In digital marketing services, the goal is to always be tracking, analyzing, and refining the B2B marketing strategy in place.
No matter how polished a marketing system may be, there is always room for improvement. It is important to be able to notice and react to changes that will occur for the better or for the worse in the digital environment.
Whether through an in-house marketing department or a digital marketing agency, here are three areas to monitor that will make the most of your marketing resources.
Traffic, while it is important to focus on, can easily consume a majority of an organization’s marketing resources.
While certain traffic metrics are critical, raw inbound traffic numbers alone will not provide the information needed to create a strategy for improvement.
Instead look at collecting the actionable information. This data looks at where the website’s traffic comes from, the bounce rates, who are the visitors coming to the website, and what searches lead the visitors to the site. Identifying positive results in the traffic data would include:
Increases in traffic volume from relevant sources not matched by a decrease in traffic elsewhere
A reduced bounce rate
Increased organic traffic
Engagement is at the core of successful marketing resources. Knowing the reactions and thoughts of visitors on a website or social media platform gives great insight to a company.
Monitoring trends and interacts on a website helps to identify different ways to reach targeted audiences. Through watching these trends a company can discover different segments of people visiting the site.
By collecting this data, a marketing team can develop a marketing strategy that will appeal directly to each customer type.
Using metrics on a business’s website are simple. When monitoring the statistics of a website looking for increasing “unique visitors” mean the brand’s visibility is improving. As well, watching for "opt-ins" and consistent "return visits" indicate success in your landing pages and the early stages of your inbound marketing funnel.
Another metric to pay close attention to is the "most popular pages" on a site.
This helps to identify what visitors are interested in when coming to a company’s website. Tracking the path of users across different pages will also help to fine tune which pages customers are most interested in and how customers discover information on a website.
To track performance on social media, a marketing team will use data collected from the company’s website and the social media platforms.
For example, check the statistics of what visitors click on once brought onto a website through social media, ways positive and organic comments of the business are made on social media, and the consistency of activity and engagement occurring through the social media platform. A successful social media presence is largely self-sustaining, but it takes consistent engagement to reach this stage.
All the great data in the world doesn't matter if it cost too much to produce a lead.
Make sure to look at what a lead will cost and what a lead will provide in a more granular fashion. This strategy makes discovering the origin of high-value leads easier to spot. Then the focusing efforts can be placed towards these leads.
In the same way, this marketing resource works to identify where low-value leads originate. This gives a warning light that something must be corrected in the marketing funnel. It is crucial to know where leads come from in the digital marketing process.