By For digital marketers, it’s so easy to get caught up in day-to-day tweaking, reviewing, and optimising.
And although quick wins feel great, when was the last time you took a holistic, birds-eye view of your marketing strategy and tactics?
It sounds daunting, but answering the following questions can get you on your way to better marketing performance and a healthy return on investment.
Is our marketing output engaging?
It’s so rare these days that a prompted message to ‘get in touch’ is followed by the desired action. ‘Value’ is now the optimal marketing currency, and you should be handing it out like there’s no tomorrow.
Whether you’re helping to answer a common question through a blog post, providing in-depth thought leadership through a webinar, or offering an ebook that your audience will keep coming back to, a potential customer will remember you for your great content.
Engaging your potential buyers means a marriage of great content with optimal context - offering the right thing at the right time. Even social media ads should be directed towards great, engaging content.
Is OUR MARKETING demonstrating ROI?
Your colleagues will always want to see the fruits of your labour. And can you blame them? It can be frustrating for both you and them when there are no clear-cut stats or reports to show that your marketing is working.
First of all, you should have a goal cost-per-lead in mind and will have discussed this with your Managing Director and Head of Sales beforehand. Not having a goal in mind will make planning and budgeting difficult, and you'll have nothing to compare your performance to.
You should set up cost-per-conversion tracking for social media and Google ad campaigns, build UTM links that show where your traffic is attributed to, create goals in Google Analytics, and provide regular reports of your traffic> leads> sales conversion funnel.
Is our audience defined enough?
All businesses have ‘an idea’ of who their target audience is. But does yours have this intelligence documented and readily available for whoever needs access?
Documenting the company’s ideal customers (or buyer personas) with their pain points, seniority, and where they ‘hang out’ online will help keep in mind who you’re targeting. This will inform the language you should be using, and will undoubtedly help to refine your targeting when setting up ad placements.
It's not about the buyers you could sell to, but rather narrowing it down to the ones you want to sell to. Appeal to everyone and you’ll appeal to no one.
Are we A/B testing enough?
It’s always a great sign when you’re bringing in high amounts of traffic. But it’s not so great when the traffic isn’t generating leads of great quality. Digital marketing is a science as much as an art, and any scientist worth their salt will test the variables.
To optimise for conversions, you should A/B test everything you can across your website to inform your decisions with data, rather than gut-feeling. That means creating small iterations to emails, CTA’s, landing pages, and ads.
Once you get your results and they are resounding, keep a log of which formats, phrases or even button colours perform best, and use it for your ongoing marketing output. Need more ideas on A/B testing? Check out our free Top 30 Lead Generation Ideas Guide.
Is marketing aligned with our sales team?
Simply sending your sales teams 100s of leads on a spreadsheet won’t cut it anymore.
Different leads will have contacted you at different stages of the buyer journey, and should therefore be treated differently depending on their level of interest. If there’s no personalisation during the sales process, then all of your lead generating tactics would have been in vain.
Using a CRM system such as Hubspot Free will not only increase your lead quality, but also puts power in the hands of your salespeople to reach out at the right time.
Not only that, but a CRM is a huge time-saver. There’s no need for ‘status update’ meetings for each contact, as you’ll have access to where they’ve been on your website, and what they’ve downloaded. Follow-up messages from your sales team can also be automated, ensuring your sales process is smarter and will react better to your leads.
Test your marketing performance
To help you assess your marketing strategy, we’ve put together a 12 question quiz which will give you a report with personalised advice and guidance based on your results.
Take the quiz today and get your results.
