By 
At a time where the oil and gas industry are enduring a tough start to 2016, you need to ensure that your marketing outputs add value to the business and ultimately drive new leads. If you manage to do this successfully, the marketing budget you’ve worked so hard to obtain in the first place can be justified.
Digital marketing has enabled marketers to track and monitor KPIs giving them the firepower they need to sustain and grow their marketing budget in the future. To help sustain your budget, and prove the importance of marketing in your organisation, make sure you track and monitor the following five digital marketing KPIs…
1 – Website visitors
Google Analytics provides oil and gas Marketing Managers with a perfect platform to track the amount of visitors that come to the website. Year-on-year you should be aiming to grow constantly your visitor numbers both through organic and referral traffic (which is covered later in the blog).
Organic traffic is visitors that come to your website by searching for your company, product or services through a search engines such as Google. Organic traffic can be increased by ensuring your website is fully optimised for search engines (SEO), and by creating blog articles about the topics your target audience may be searching for.
By increasing the amount of visitors to your website, you are singlehandedly exposing your business to more people – increasing the brand exposure and hopefully generating more business leads too.
2 – Website contacts
Whether you offer a monthly e-newsletter or downloadable eBooks on your website, monitoring website contacts give you a genuine idea of how many web visitors are interested in what you have to offer.
Of course, the more ways you give web visitors of signing up to become a “contact”, the more chance you’ve got of nurturing these contacts into a genuine business lead. As well as monthly e-newsletters, eBooks and special offers which sit on a landing page, can have a big impact on the amount of new contacts you obtain.
3 – Visitor to Contact conversion
Digital marketing consistently needs optimisation to drive as many business leads as possible through your website. A good way to judge the success of this is by working out your visitor to contact conversion rate. As a best practice guide, your website should aim to convert 1.5% of all visitors into contacts.
(Contacts / Web Visits) x 100 = conversion %
Now you know the importance of increasing your contacts database, it’s important to monitor and track this conversion percentage as a KPI. As well as looking to produce and offer more content to drive more contacts, adding call-to-actions to direct people to the content may increase the conversion percentage too.
4 – Traffic sources
As well as tracking organic traffic through Google Analytics, the tool can be used to track the performance of other traffic sources or ‘referral sites’. This gives you a key performance indicator on other digital marketing tools you are putting into practice. Email newsletters, social media and paid advertising campaigns can all be tracked to see the performance of each and the impact it is having to drive web visitors, contacts and business leads.
As well as giving you the ammunition to track and improve the performance of these digital tools, justification of time and money spent on social media or advertising can be clearly tracked and shown to the senior management team if requested.
5 – Leads to the sales team
The marketing and the sales team in any organisation should work closely together. While the marketing team can attract genuine business leads through a multitude of tools, the sales team can close the sale based on the information given from marketing.
While the above four KPIs are important, the amount of business leads you hand across to the sales team are the most vital to maintaining your marketing budget. From these leads, you should be able to track back the sales conversion rate and the sales order completed – giving you a financial statistic that proves the effectiveness of marketing.
Photo Credit: Pixabay