Understanding The Optics of the Digital Marketing Landscape and Maximising ROI
Digital marketing is simply essential in today’s day and age. Unlike traditional marketing, which is static and is usually limited to a local audience, digital marketing techniques such as search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing (Google Adwords), social media marketing (Facebook, Instagram or Influencer Marketing), Remarketing and LinkedIn marketing can reach a much wider (in some cases unlimited) audience.
When you consider that Facebook alone has over 2 billion users, the potential of digital marketing becomes abundantly clear. Not only can you reach a larger digital community, but you can also target your ads specifically to those who it will appeal to.
One particularly useful advantage to digital marketing techniques over traditional ones like TV ads, billboards and flyers is that it is actually measurable. Think about it, how will you know how many people see your billboard unless you’re standing there taking note of every passerby? Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows for metrics and analytics.
Numbers and volume aside, an adept digital marketing agency can literally sift through millions of active users to target leads (identified based on buyer persona, demographics, buying and spending habits, position titles, gender and even eating and driving habits).
Using Data to Make Better Decisions
Platforms such as Google Analytics are a powerful tool through which you can track the kind of person who best responds to your posts and ads, helping you narrow down your target audience. When you are targeting your ads to the right audience, you will enjoy better engagement rates and ROI (Return On Investment).
Google’s analytics products helped us improve engagement by 33% and click-throughs by 21% for content promotions on our homepage. – Mia Vallo – Sr. Director, Marketing Analytics, National Geographic
What is Return on Investment (ROI)?
ROI or return on investment is a measure of the gain or loss generated on an investment relative to the amount of money invested, using expressed as a percentage. ROI can be calculated using this formula:
ROI = (Net Profit / Cost of Investment) x 100
This calculation can be applied to gains and losses for various types of investments. In the case of digital marketing, marketers will track metrics to determine if a campaign was successful in terms of direct profit gained. While these can provide an initial insight in to immediate sales, conversions provide a limited view as to the overall success of your campaign as they do not take certain scenarios into account such as customers who engage with your post but only choose to make a purchase weeks later when they are ready. This should still be recognised as a success, and you will need to determine the metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you associate with success for your digital marketing campaign.
“Nine out of ten (90%) global marketers are not trained to calculate return on investment (ROI)” – Fournaise Marketing Group,
With a bit of research and prior thought however it is possible to come up with a specialised selection that will aid you in measuring your own ROI as accurately as is possible.
How to measure ROI for your Digital Marketing Campaign
Sweet Fish Media describes the aim of content marketing as “leading a prospect toward making a purchase.”
This purchase (if it comes) doesn’t always have to be direct, as just raising brand awareness can eventually lead to someone purchasing your product.
Therefore, you have to be able to measure your direct or immediate ROI as well as the long-term ROI.
This may seem like a nebulous concept, but by being specific, setting goals for your campaign and developing your own set of unique KPIs, your ROI can be calculated more easily than you may think. Some examples of useful KPIs for measuring ROI are shown below.
Consumption metrics
Examples include website traffic, video views, page views and downloads. By themselves, these metrics do not provide much but with a few added questions to give context they can very useful in measuring a campaign’s success. These stats reveal how many repeat hits your page or links get, and allow you to weigh up your consumption metrics against the competition. These metrics provide a wealth of knowledge, and can be easily measured and compared through platforms such as Google Analytics.
Sharing Metrics
Sharing metrics show you where your audience is engaged enough to share your content with others in the form of social media shares, email forwards and clicks on inbound links. This is key, as you’ll come to find out whether your content is relevant and engaging enough for your audience, and build on this in the future.
Lead Generation Metrics
Some of the biggest questions you’ll have for your digital marketing campaign are how many people are consuming the content, and how many of these people are legitimate leads. Lead generation metric examples include new subscribers, free trial conversions and completed forms. When looked at alone, it may not seem like there’s much value to them, but when context is provided, there’s some fantastic insights that can be taken from them. Google Analytics is a very useful tool in providing this context and doing the comparisons for you.
Sales Metrics
Of course, it’s not enough to just look at engagement or leads: you want to know what sales your campaigns have actually generated too! Include offline sales along with your online sales conversions to make sure you have the complete picture. Take a wide look at these sales and compare them against other metrics such as social media shares to see if they correlate. If you had a spike in sales conversions when a certain post gathered a lot of shares, then there’s a chance you’re onto something good with your content marketing strategy.
All of these metrics provide useful insights into the success of a campaign and provide you with information needed to calculate your ROI. But by adding context to the metrics with platforms such as Google Analytics, they suddenly become far more specific and much more useful pieces of information.
Analytics for Insights (Google Analytics and Google Analytics 360)
There is one name that is synonymous with measuring indicators of success for digital marketing campaigns: Google Analytics. It is an incredibly useful platform as it allows you to access all the basic consumption metrics as well as integrating advanced functions with 3rd party platforms for ‘heatmaps’, which allows you to see exactly where people click on your page, and allowing you to create a custom analytics dashboard. Google Analytics is the free version, while Analytics 360 is a paid services that includes deeper analysis. Try starting out with the free version and seeing if you need to upgrade later on.
Analytics platforms are now an indispensable tool for small businesses and enterprises. It allows you to ensure you are keeping up with your competitors, and to make well informed decisions that your audience will actually respond to. Having a specific target audience allows you to invest money where it matters instead of taking a scatter gun approach.
Useful Features Offered by Google Analytics
Custom Analytics Dashboards are key for measuring your ROI. This feature allows you to customise your own dashboard so that you get instant reports on what matters to you instead of having to spend hours sifting through all the metrics just to find what you need.
Real time reporting is also offered by Google Analytics, allowing you to see engagement on your post or site right as it’s happening. This is a great way of experimenting with temporary marketing initiatives such as promotional campaigns on social media, allowing you to gauge the audience response on a micro scale before you make any major changes.
Remarketing is another tool that can dramatically increase your sales and ROI. Remarketing is the process of identifying which customers have been engaged by your content previously and are likely to convert to a sale, and then re-engaging them through targeted advertising. Google Analytics makes this easy by providing a custom remarketing audience comprised of mobile advertising IDs or cookies that are linked to a group of users you have identified through their behavior on your sites as people that you want to re-engage.
Maximising your ROI
In order to successfully maximise your ROI, follow these three key steps
- Identify the most relevant metrics for your campaign.
- Contextualise these metrics by comparing them over time or against competitors.
- Use an analytics platform such as Google Analytics to get the best insights out of your data.
Analytic Insights and data driven marketing allows digital marketing managers or business owners, although it is difficult to work out the right metrics to track. Talk to us today about your performance tracking and data analytics requirements.
Trust Singapore’s Authority on SEO and Data Analytics
Digital Squad help you setup custom dashboards on Google Analytics, Google Analytics 360, Google Attribution 360 and even their latest Google Data Studio.
Our advanced capabilities for data driven clients include integrations with 3rd party analytics platforms such as Optimizely, Kissmetrics, HotJar. Adobe Analytics and Klipfolio to name the popular vendors.
We can also help you with Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and recommend reading our latest blog on increasing conversion rate with simple psychology.
Make sure your business stays ahead of the game this year with help from the experts at Digital Squad, a digital marketing agency Singapore. The team at Digital Squad can help you with Remarketing, Facebook Marketing Singapore, AdWords Marketing Singapore and SEO Singapore. Looking for more? We’re the leading digital marketing agency in Singapore and if you want to leverage the power of YouTube advertising, Instagram marketing or any other social media marketing Singapore, talk to us about how we can start converting your visitors.
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