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What are your goals for the next business quarter? How are you going to measure the results? Do you know the emerging best practices to go about improving those results?

Modern marketing is as much about metrics as it is about messaging. In 2017 digital platforms make it easier than ever for you to better track the KPI’s that matter the most to your business.

Key performance indicators (or KPIs) are specific, numerical metrics tracked in order to measure their progress towards a goal. Without the right ones, however, your company might be reporting and making decisions based on misleading information. That ends up with bad strategy which results in loss of revenue, and nobody wants that!

In this article we are going to explore how we can use digital marketing to achieve 4 Critical Business Goals , their supporting KPI’s and tools you can use to help you improve on these metrics.

 

Brand Awareness | Get Website Visitors.

 

What is it?:

Essentially building brand awareness is about getting more people to know who you are and keeping your brand top of mind for current customers. The activities carried out to increase your brand awareness will be centred around generating interest in your products and services through engaging content and campaigns. You have a problem with this specific goal if you’re not generating enough monthly visits to your website.

Brand Awareness Content:

Thought leadership and entertainment to build brand awareness

  • Blog Posts: Writing content centred around solving customer pain points is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Ensure you share your contact with your contacts and social media fan bases.
  • Infographics: This a great way to visually explain a heavy set of data points to your audience or step-by-step instructions without the barrage of text to scare away your potential customer. Infographics are immensely popular on the web because of how they organise data into engaging visuals.
  • Videos: 80% of the social web is predicted to be video by the end of 2017, you can already see it in your Facebook, Twitter & Instagram newsfeeds. When you write your blog posts, ensure you create a short video to go along with it. As more information surfaces on the web, people prefer to consume info in small bite size chunks, especially on social media. So practice turning content into videos and sharing them on social platforms to gain viewership.

Brand Awareness Tools

  • Social Media Ads: The days of posting a cat meme and automatically getting 100’s of likes are long gone, you have to pay to play now. Relying on organic reach alone when sharing content on social media will guarantee you a low reach. To maximise the amount of people seeing your content you’ll have to make good use of the paid advertising options available on social media.
  • PPC Ads: PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. This is a cost efficient way to gain visitors to your site as you’d pay per click instead of for just reach. Your Google PPC ads will surface in search results and partnering websites all over the web.
  • Google AMP Pages: AMP is a tool that helps web pages load faster which potentially improves usability and convinces visitors to stay longer on your site engaging with your content. Google will also rank AMP pages higher up in search results.
  • Facebook Instant Articles: Similar to AMP pages on Google. Facebook Instant Articles allow your blog posts to load instantly and Facebook will also rank your content higher in the newsfeed.

How Do You Measure It?:

Primary KPI: Website Visitors

Supporting Metrics:

  • Referral visits
  • Site Sessions
  • New visitors
  • Returning visitors

 

Lead Generation | Convert Visitors Into Leads.

 

What is it?:

This is centred around getting actionable data from people interested in buying your products or services to pass on to your sales team. The activities carried out to generate leads for your business / brand will be content focused on providing tools to help your potential customers when they’re considering your solution such as quizzes, calculators etc. You have a problem with this specific goal if you’re not converting enough visitors into leads.

Lead Generation Content:

Tools to help buyers when they are looking for solutions

  • Ebooks / Whitepapers are great because people want to deal with a company that knows what they are talking about. When you can offer them an eBook on a topic they are interested in, they will now know they can rely on you to provide the information they need to make the right decision. Ebooks allow you to collect customer data like names, email address etc. Ensure to use a form for your lead to fill out before receiving your Ebook.
  • Webinars allow you to share a live video with your audience to help them better understand an issue that your product/service can solve for them. Webinars allows you to humanise your brand and gives your audience a chance to connect with you deeper through a face-to-face interaction.
  • Quizzes are typically engaging and quick, requiring less of a commitment from the prospect than reading a ebook for example, they are generally great for collecting customer data in a fun and engaging way.
  • How-To Guides in this new Do-It-Yourself YouTube generation where every thing you need to know is a search result away, its important that your business comes up when your potential customer searches for a how-to solution. So go over your frequently asked customer questions and see what issues your customers would be interested in getting a How-To-Guide on.

Lead Generation Tools

  • Email Marketing: Email marketing is one of the only channels that consumers ask to receive content from you, which is why you should take that privilege and send them content to help them solve pain points and make their lives easier. Over half of all people that use the internet use and send an email everyday. Email marketing is economical and highly effective, explore tools like Mailchimp to get started.
  • Chatbots: Imagine if your business development team could still collect information from leads and answer basic product questions in the middle of the night when all your competitors were sleeping soundly in their beds. That’s what a properly developed AI chatbot can do for you. Investing in a chatbot is a great way to automate certain points of your business processes while allowing the interjection of a human customer service rep.
  • Retargeting Ads: It is estimated that only 2% of click-through website visitors convert (aka: make a purchase) on their very first visit to an online store and about 96% of all website visitors visit websites when they’re NOT ready to buy. These ads allow your business to re-engage those people who were not ready to buy via ads that they’ll see on the sites they visit frequently on the internet. Retargeting has become an incredibly effective way to increase sales and is definitely worth looking into if your serious about capturing lead data.

How Do You Measure It?:

Primary KPI: Total Leads

Supporting Metrics:

  • Gated downloads
  • Lead source
  • Cost per lead (CPL)
  • Lead quality score

 

Lead Nurturing | Convert Leads Into Customers.

 

What is it?:

Lead nurturing activities are focused on converting those leads that you captured into paying customers. You do this by providing them with company specific information to help evaluate and re-affirm their choice to use your product or service. You have a problem here if you are not getting enough new customers.

Lead Nurturing Content:

Company-specific information to help evaluate and re-affirm the selection in your product or service.

  • Case Studies: Create wonderful client success stories that brilliantly demonstrates the benefits of your product/service to your potential customer.
  • Customer Testimonials: A few positive words from your customers can go a long way. Testimonials are a valuable form of social proof that gives your value claims more legitimacy. For many businesses, it’s ideal to have a website page devoted to testimonials where all of them are visible. Its also important that they sound authentic and mention in detail how your product or service directly made an improvement in their lives.
  • Calculators: Calculators offer an upfront and complimentary service that gives potential customers the tangible figures they’re looking for in an interactive, engaging form. Imagine you’re a car dealer, having a car finance calculator would make your site more appealing to a visitor. Not only do calculators help convert online leads, they also empower salespeople during conversations at a large scale.

Lead Nurturing Tools:

  • Facebook Audiences: Utilise Facebook Lookalike audiences and upload a subscriber list from your newsletters or downloaded offers and advertise to them and audiences similar to them on Facebook & Instagram.
  • Email Workflows: An email workflow is series of automated emails that will be sent — or not — based on a person’s behavior or contact information. With workflows, you can trigger actions based on leads that seem ready to buy. This allows you to send them the right set of messages at the right time.
  • Phone Call: At this stage you should have your sales team reach out to leads via phone call to close the deal.

How Do You Measure It?:

Primary KPI: Customers

Supporting Metrics:

  • Conversion rate
  • Cost of customer acquisition (COCA)
  • New customers
  • Revenue won

 

Customer Retention | Convert Customers Into Advocates

 

What is it?:

This is where your customers have the ability to become brand advocates if treated right. You have a problem achieving this goal if you are losing clients.

Customer Retention Content:

Keep your customers informed and satisfied with scheduled emails, social media, and personal outreach

Customer Retention Tools

  • CRM: Collecting and organizing actionable customer data is a full-time job, and one that isn’t very forgiving of mistakes. So a CRM tool is a must for anyone who wants to take customer satisfaction to the next level. This allows you to know how much each customer is spending with you, email conversations etc. The better you know your customer the better you can serve them and a CRM system does just that.

How Do You Measure It?:

Primary KPI: Customer Retention Rate

  • CRR = ((E-N)/S)*100
    • Clients at the end of a period – E
    • Number Of New clients acquired during that period – N
    • Clients at the start of that period – S

 

Conclusion

 

With that you should be on your way to measuring and improving the goals and KPI’s important to your business.

Goals

  • Brand Awareness
  • Generate Leads
  • Turn Leads Into Customers
  • Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates

Main KPI’s

  • Website Visitors
  • Of Leads
  • Of Customers
  • Customer Retention Rate

Are you currently measuring for these goals and KPI’s? Tell us in the comments!

Ikonik Digital

As an ROI-focused agency, Ikonik Digital helps brands and businesses reach & understand their customers while growing the bottom line.