Like anything in business, if you don’t measure the results of your digital marketing strategy, how can you be sure it’s effective?

In today’s busy world, it’s far too easy to get wrapped up in new marketing campaigns, send them out of the door and leave it at that. No second glance, no check-in on progress and, ultimately, no review of what transpired.

This is such a shame, because it means all the hard work, investment and time spent on such campaigns effectively goes to waste. Sure, you might gain an influx of new leads, but if you don’t track them (or the lack of leads) back to that campaign, there’s no way you can either repeat your successes or improve upon failures.

Let’s think about three key areas of a digital marketing strategy and how you can assess whether or not they’re working for your business.

Content

Content really is king in all forms of digital marketing. Without it, there’s no substance, personality or methods with which you can engage and inspire your audience to take action.

To suss out if your content is working, you need to dig into website analytics. The performance of each blog post, for instance, can easily be accessed in tools like Google Analytics. You can review the average time people spend on the page, the bounce rate (i.e. the percentage of visitors who immediately head elsewhere) and how many people are clicking on the call-to-action (CTA).

You can also ask yourself a couple of questions while evaluating your content marketing:

1. Is the content we’re producing valuable? If you’re experiencing high bounce rates and low average time on site metrics, the content you’re publishing may have missed the mark with your target audience. Which brings me onto the next question…
2. Have you defined your target market? Sound like a daft question? Not necessarily. It’s all too easy to dive head-first into a content marketing strategy without thinking properly about who you’re creating the content for.

Telling the story of your business should be fun and aimed squarely at the people who are most likely to become customers. Just make sure the content you’re putting out there is telling the right story!

SEO

Assessing the performance of search engine optimisation is tricky if you’re not an expert.

Tracking leads that may have come from your SEO strategy requires a knowledgeable pair of hands due to the sheer number of variables in play and the ever-changing search engine landscape.

If there’s one area where you should invest in the services of an external marketing consultant - it’s this one!

Social media

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn can be very profitable playgrounds for your digital marketing effort, but it’s easy to throw a shedload of effort and expense down the drain if you don’t evaluate what you’re doing.

Ask yourself these three questions about your social media marketing strategy:

1. Are we consistent across each channel? Consistency in tone of voice is vital if you’re to develop a coherent social media presence for the business. If you’re not talking the same language on each platform, your brand image won’t be particularly strong or recognisable.
2. Is the right audience being reached? Just like your content marketing, social media requires a tightly defined audience if it’s to be an effective way to market the business and its products. Have you worked out who your audience consists of?
3. Does social act as a lead generator? It’s important to get people to visit your website, but social media should be just as capable of providing leads. Are you publishing enough information to tempt people to contact you without having to visit your website?

Wrapping up

I’ve spent many years evaluating marketing strategies, but digital marketing has opened up a vast number of ways by which performance can be monitored and evaluated.

You can’t do it all in house (that’s why people like me exist!), but with my tips above, you can at least start asking yourself the right questions.