Integrated digital marketers (IDMs) depend on data analytics to monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns across websites, social media, and mobile platforms. To make sure each effort is meeting its goals, they may evaluate different performance metrics, such as website bounce rates, keyword rankings, email open rates, landing page conversions, visitor-to-lead ratios, lead-to-customer ratios, customer retention rates, and ad click-through rates along with costs per impression. Aiming for excellence, IDMs use user data to measure marketing efforts against actual outcomes.
In other words, they keep their EAR to the ground.
Here are three ways to do the same:
Engage – The first step is to gather both external and internal feedback on each IDM campaign initiative. Marketers should connect with those who interact with prospects and customers daily. This could include members of the sales team, customer service representatives, or strategic partners like affiliates or distributors. This type of “3rd party” input can be very useful, especially when compared to internal feedback from the IDM group’s social media manager(s). This approach also helps reduce the narrow view that can happen when a business relies too much on just the marketing team’s perspective.
Analyze – With the aid of new technologies such as marketing automation software, today’s IDMs can review and dissect numerous data points from a company’s web, social, and local-mobile marketing initiatives.
IDMs are most effective when they combine both inductive and deductive reasoning to data analysis:
1. The inductive approach relies on specific data to form broader generalizations: “When we offered W piece of content to X audience segment on Y medium, we got Z response rate. Therefore, we would do well to offer more W-type content to X segment in the future.”
2. The deductive approach uses data to arrive at specific conclusions gleaned from broad generalizations: “Typically, audience segment X seems to like W-type content over all media. Therefore, if we offer this new piece of W content on Y medium, we expect to get a favorable response rate from X.”
Refine – When used properly, data can breathe meaning into past efforts by creating a framework to assess the success or failure of specific campaigns; its conclusions can also inform how future marketing initiatives can be tweaked to produce better results. By combining feedback from external resources with internal data analysis, brands can improve upon existing digital strategies and formulate new ones.
Integrated digital marketing is disruptive and dynamic, constantly shattering the status quo. To succeed, its practitioners must always focus on performance management, relying on high-tech marketing software and tactics to efficiently track key performance indicators (KPIs); by doing so, IDMs can nimbly tweak campaign elements to respond to changes in consumer demand.
For today’s integrated digital marketers, performance management is all about keeping your EAR to the ground.
