With more business being conducted online, marketers are increasing their focus on online marketing and seek to take advantage of websites, search engines, paid search, and social media as mediums to attract and engage prospects. As demonstrated by the terrific response to our recent webinar, there is a real need to improve the effectiveness of online marketing and to show the business value and ROI of online marketing campaigns and initiatives.
Activity measures are a starting point to understanding whether online marketing is generating interest, but outcome measures show true business value. We can take this further by relating costs to outcomes (cost per conversion, cost per opportunity). And it starts down the path to true marketing ROI, which can be achieved by combining this data with CRM data to show incremental sales and ERP data to show incremental revenue and profit.
Here is a summary of a best practice approach to Improving Online Marketing Effectiveness:
- Begin by mapping out the ideal marketing process flow that will attract, engage and convert prospects to be quality sales leads
- Identify the website navigational paths and content that will guide visitors through that ideal process
- Set Goals for desired actions you want those visitors to take based on that process flow
- Determine the online marketing initiatives and campaigns you will use to attract and engage prospects
- For each initiative determine the audience profile, outreach, value proposition, messaging, engagement plan and call to action that will drive them to your website and the associated budget you are willing to spend
- Perform keyword research to identify the most appropriate set of keywords that prospects will use to find you online
- Ensure that you are optimizing your website layout, tags, content, page titles etc for those keywords
- Utilize paid search to augment your search engine optimization, paying particular attention to keyword selection (based on alignment, popularity and what you are prepared to pay), the ad copy and the landing page content
- Measure all your online initiatives to show activity, outreach, engagement and most importantly outcomes – goal completions, conversion ratio and cost per conversion
- Even better is tracking through to incremental sales, revenue and gross profit driven directly from Online Marketing!
We have a free white paper that goes into much more detail available here. A free trial of the software used to provide the examples in the white paper is also available here.
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