We don't have to remind you about the importance of strategic planning in the context of your company's long-term vision. That said, it's all too easy to dive headfirst into a complex, multi-channel online marketing campaign without fully anticipating its operational impacts.
Since money talks, it's especially important to identify, communicate and react to your campaign's effects on your company's financial profile. A focused, responsive program of content marketing might be the most effective way to generate leads, but it won't do any good if you can't convince your superiors to allocate funding for it.
How Does Your Online Marketing Campaign Affect Your Firm's Bottom Line?
As they say, you need to spend money to make money. Even if you're utilizing in-house employees, your digital marketing campaign requires a substantial amount of resources to start and sustain. It also requires your sales team to speak with more prospects, your customer support team to handle more customer queries and your product service team to keep track of more merchandise or service offerings.
Fortunately, marketing produces returns in the form of increased revenue and profit. You need to maximize these happy returns while minimizing unnecessary or low-efficiency investments. Your company's CFO is sure to take a keen interest in your ability to do so.
Key Metrics for Tracking Operational Impacts
The "headline" metrics for tracking your digital marketing campaign impacts include cost-per-sale, overall revenue and profit. There are more specific metrics that illuminate your campaign's performance as well:
- Inbound website traffic by source of the traffic
- Your landing pages' bounce rate
- Your call-to-action's conversion rate of incoming traffic to qualified leads
- Percentage of your qualified leads that engage with your sales team
- Your closure rate of sales leads to customers
- Lifetime Value of a sale to your company
- Cost of customer acquisition
To ensure that you're getting the most out of your campaign, it's important to heed these metrics as you experiment with new types of content, lead nurturing and sales. For instance, longer blog posts might actually increase the amount of time the average visitor spends on your site and encourage them to retain more information about your products. Well-placed calls-to-action on your homepage and internal pages could dramatically improve its lead-generation capabilities.
Improve Efficiency with Long-Term, Strategic Thinking
No matter what metrics you use to evaluate your online marketing campaign, you should devise strategies that maximize its financial benefits and minimize its negative operational impacts and communicate them to your superiors or stakeholders. Examples of such action might include:
- Integrating your marketing and sales processes
- Creating a sustainable, formalized lead generation protocol that includes follow-up emails, newsletters and other content-rich contact points
- Measuring lead quality that includes feedback from your sales team
- Creating an internal lead management and business development system for your marketing, sales, and support teams
- Making helpful content and support resources like blog posts, FAQs and email support available to your customers through your website and social media accounts
- Implementing an integrated marketing automation, CRM and analytics platform to easily track what is working (and not working) in order to optimize your marketing and sales efforts that will increase your revenue while lowering your cost of acquisition
Anticipate Your Digital Marketing Campaign Impacts
As with any aspect of your company's growth strategy, it's important to anticipate the marketing, sales and operational impacts of your digital marketing efforts. However, it should now be clear that the extent to which you need to have a digital marketing plan to minimize or eliminate disruptions or even campaign failure can be a bit intimidating.
Don't try to shoulder this burden on your own. By clearly communicating your marketing needs to your company's C-suite and department heads, you'll put yourself in a good position to leverage the nearly boundless opportunity afforded by a well-rounded online marketing campaign.
Get Help When You Need It
It can be a significant challenge to evaluate so many different moving parts to your digital marketing efforts that can impact your success. If you don’t have the in-house resources or expertise to stay on top of quickly changing technologies, techniques and processes, you may need specialized talent.
According to Gartner Research, up to 50% of marketers outsource a portion of their digital marketing activities. Augmenting your internal staff with specialized partners may be the best approach for you to achieve your goals.
To best understand the critical elements you need to address in your digital marketing plans in order to focus on growing your company revenue, download the whitepaper: “8 Critical Ingredients of a Digital Marketing Plan.”
