It’s time for the last part of creating a digital program: Measurement.
The steps, as we use them for clients, are: Listen, assess, engage, measure, and refine/improve.
You can find the tools and tips for listening, assessing, and engaging here, here, and here.
There is a lot of discussion about return-on-engagement or influence being the right measurement tool.
But, as a business owner, I’m here to tell you that’s horse hockey.
Yes, there are things that are important to business growth, such as brand awareness, credibility, thought leadership, and even engagement and influence. And those aren’t wholly measurable to numbers. But, if you consider how you achieve those things, you can measure their effectiveness.
Unless your website is antiquated, the recommendations I’m about to make will work for any size business.
You need access to:
- Google analytics
- Clicky
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software (even if it’s just in Excel or Constant Contact)
- Content management system on your website or blog
With the exception of Clicky and the CRM you use, the other tools are free. We like to use the $59/year Clicky option because it gives us everything we need with a cherry on top.
Then you’re going to build your dashboard. It’s going to look similar to the following:
All of this information can be found in one of the four tools listed above.
For this particular client, we use email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, the response campaign, and content marketing. We measure what every, single person does when they come from one of those campaigns.
We track them through the process. Do they open a newsletter and click through different pages? Do they read and comment on the same article through the response campaign? Do they read and share the website content?
Once they view more than 10 pages, they become a hot lead and the sales team begins their follow-up.
Before that, we “force feed” content through email marketing (or lead nurturing) to get the prospects to the 10 pages.
This is the hardest part in the five-step digital program. It takes a real analytical mind to understand what the numbers mean, how to create goals in Google analytics, how to use the four tools together, what to track, and how to improve your reporting.
It will take you about 90 days to get your dashboard where you want it. But then it will all be automated and you can begin to show a real return-on-investment for your digital efforts.
Now you’re ready to begin your digital program. Of course, the last step is refine and improve, which doesn’t constitute an entire blog post. We look at the analytics every day and, every week, we refine the numbers to be sure we have an accurate accounting of the costs and benefits for every campaign we conduct.
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