Time and time again we speak with companies, large and small, about digital marketing. It’s hard for many organizations to understand how digital marketing works and how it is a smart investment. Sometimes, the prospect will want to get their feet wet and request one digital marketing service. Our agency is not setup as an a la carte pricing structure. For example, you wouldn’t be able to just do a blog post with us. The reason is simple. We’ve tried it and it doesn’t work. There is a giant ball that needs to get rolling for success in digital marketing, and a tiny push isn’t going to make it budge. At the end of the day, a client will want to see results (ROI) sooner than later.
 
For many organizations investing in marketing collateral, trade show displays, direct mailers, newspaper, magazines just to name few, is easier to justify the investment. The client can actually touch their investment. It’s easier to see value in something tangible, even if it’s not bringing results.
 
By providing clear goals and metrics to our clients we have helped them understand where their digital marketing expense is going, and how it’s working. Soon the mindset for digital marketing is looked at as an investment rather than an expense. By sharing results and achieving their goals we show our clients their marketing dollars are being well spent.
 
Here are the metrics we discuss with our clients.

Website Traffic

Unless you are a startup, generating some traffic to a website is the easy (easier) part of digital marketing. Depending on the size of your organization, you may have a sales team hitting the pavement, radio ads being rolled out, direct mailers or even a full page ad in a industry specific magazine. What’s interesting is that after all these traditional marketing efforts, the user always ends up at a company website. It’s just today’s human behavior to search online before committing to anything.
 
Since we keep in track of our client’s website traffic, we are able to talk about patterns and online trends that are developing on their site. After a period of time, we are able to pin point where and how our clients can take the most advantage of their efforts and gain more traffic.
 

Lead Generation

Once you have all this website traffic, the next question that shows up is, now what? What are you going to do with that traffic? Is it quality traffic or is it just ghost spam that’s gone wild creating mayhem in your traffic report.
 
Discussing with our clients the amount and type of leads that are generated from the website is very important. For those who struggle with picking up the phone, the concept of cold calling, successful inbound lead generation could leave that in the past. The user made the first move by showing interest in your product and/or service so your communication is no longer “cold.”
 
Once the user shows interest, we can start to determine how qualified they are as a lead. Maybe it’s a good idea for sales to follow up right away, or maybe the lead needs to be nurtured before they’re ready to make a purchase. Either way, we now have another metric to measure our efforts and to show our clients.
 

Customers

The ultimate goal for many organizations is to convert those marketing efforts into customers, readers, buyers, members, donors, etc. It is important to distinguish the value of this customer who converted on your website. What is the actual dollar amount behind this customer and what was the path that led them there?
 
These are crucial metrics we discuss with our clients. This helps us determine how aggressive we would need to be with our digital marketing efforts to help our clients achieve their goals.
 

 
We’ve found that these three metrics provide our clients that tangible element and help them understand what they get in return when investing in digital marketing.
 
If you are just getting started with digital marketing, feel free to download our inbound marketing checklist to help point you in the right direction. You can download it here.