How to Improve Your Digital Marketing Reach

by Devin Morrissey, Guest Contributor

Whether your digital marketing campaign is a wild success or it is falling flat, it is crucial in moving forward that you understand why it is thriving or tanking. If your social media marketing campaign is seeing success, wouldn’t you want to know exactly what it is that people are liking? Or, if your company suddenly had a rash of negative opinions, you’d like to figure out what it was that caused this damage to your reputation and what you can do to increase your public relations. In digital marketing, these factors can change on a dime, and tracking your efforts to keep your company on track is imperative.
​

Understand how to analyze your digital marketing efforts without wasting your time and money.

Depending on your goals and what you hope to accomplish with your digital marketing campaign, there are metrics and data to analyze the effectiveness of your efforts. But there are hundreds of metrics out there to monitor thousands of minute details, so how can you sort through them to make a quick and accurate assessment of what is working and what is not working in your marketing campaign? Read below to understand how you can analyze your digital marketing efforts without wasting your time and money on ineffective marketing tactics.

Understand What You Want Out of Your Campaign
Understanding what you hope to gain from your campaign is the first step to tracking your goals and measuring the success of your overall campaign. For instance, if your campaign is to increase your conversions, one goal you might want to track that would indicate whether or not you are having success is the number of people who subscribe to your initial email marketing efforts. The number of subscribers can be directly correlated to your email marketing tactic. This may seem like a pretty straightforward example, however, if you don’t know what it is you are looking for, or are tracking the wrong metric, you won’t get the information that is necessary to determine the next course of your email marketing campaign.

Knowing the scope of your campaign and its goals allows you to assign the proper marketing metric to track and actualize its success. Furthermore, it helps you to understand exactly where you are having success so you can capitalize on recreating it. Whatever your goal may be for your digital marketing campaign — conversion and revenue, customer engagement, traffic, brand awareness, or all of the above — there is a metric you can track to measure its success.

Monitoring Your Successes
As mentioned before, there are hundreds of metrics you can track using the help of just about as many tools. Google Analytics, MOZ, SEMrush, and many more tools can help you monitor these metrics, but finding a tool is the easy part. Understanding what metrics you should track out of the hundreds you can skip will be vital in saving time and money in your digital marketing campaign. Interpreting and understanding this data is a hot commodity in the business world. This is evident by the high demand for business analysts, and their ability to understand the analytics that make a business tick.

However, you don’t necessarily have to be a business analyst to interpret some primary metrics that can monitor the success of your goals. For example, if your goal is to drive traffic to your website, track your total site visitors frequently. Knowing how many people are visiting your site and if this metric increases or decreases over time can give you a broad overview of how your content, email, and social media marketing efforts are doing. You’ll also want to measure your bounce rate — how many visitors click away from your site after visiting just the first page — to understand if it was an accidental visit, or if your site’s landing page is discouraging potential customers and needs some work.

Click-through-rates and conversion rates can illuminate how many people have clicked on an advertisement link from an email, social media post, or otherwise to view your website’s landing page. To track the effectiveness of your brand awareness efforts, monitor the volume of posts mentioning your brand and other social media interactions.

These engagement rates are direct indicators of how your content is connecting with your customers. These metrics also provide commentary that is reflective of what people think of your brand. Tracking these metrics and many more can help you better determine the effectiveness of the goals of your campaign, helping you know if you should spend more or less money on them, and how to improve your marketing techniques.

If you can provide the user experiences to improve these metrics — wanting to visit your site and stay on your site — your site’s ranking will improve, prompting Google to show your page sooner in the search engine results page. The metrics above can improve your SEO efforts, significantly increasing traffic to your website.

In order to do this, you’ll need to provide your visitors with short page-loading times, make your site available across any device, and and providing quality content. Your SEO could be affected by something as simple as not indexing your images correctly. Naming your images correctly so Google can index and provide your images for those who search for them will make Google consider your images more useful, and therefore ranking your site higher. In many cases, you may already have hundreds or thousands of photos on your website, and renaming them one by one would be time-consuming. However, there are ways to rename and organize your photos in bulk.  

Taking Action
Now that you know what you are doing well and what isn’t working for you, you can improve in both areas. Naturally, you should take something that is a proven success and expand on recreating the success. However, this is also your time to take action on the elements of your campaign that aren’t working to turn it around. To touch on an above example, if your bounce rate is high, consider making changes to your landing page to get visitors to stay and possibly make a purchase. Or, if you have a low visit rate, you may think about taking your marketing and content in a different direction.

How do you know how to redirect your marketing efforts? Look at your engagement rates — likes, comments, shares, and other social media commentaries — to understand exactly what content worked for you and what didn’t. A high amount of likes and shares usually means that your content landed well with your audience.

If it didn’t, read comments and other social media commentary as to why your audience didn’t like it. Furthermore, ask your audience and converse with them about what you can do to reach them better. Whatever actions you take, and whatever direction you decide to aim your marketing campaign can now be monitored to quickly ascertain how effective your new tactics are — keeping your campaign on course.

Data and analytics are nothing new to understanding your audience and measuring the success of a digital marketing campaign. However, if you don’t know how to interpret this data — turning it into useful measurements to track the effectiveness of the many elements involved in a campaign — the data is meaningless. Take the information above to get you started into the vast world of metrics to keep your content, email, and social media marketing campaigns prosperous.
​

Author bio:

Devin prides himself on being a jack of all trades; his career trajectory is more a zigzag than an obvious trend, just the way he likes it. He pops up across the Pacific Northwest, though never in one place for long. You can follow him more reliably on Twitter.