Businesses selling established products must periodically analyze their marketing data or run the risk of overlooking potentially serious and expensive problems with their sales strategies. The purpose of analyzing marketing data internally is to ensure that online advertising campaigns are connecting with, and nurturing, customers at each critical point in the sales life cycle. Tools like an ROI checklist enable marketing teams and their leadership to quickly diagnose and correct inefficiencies in their advertising strategy using insights from the data.
A Good ROI Checklist Includes:
- What is your cost per customer acquisition?
- What is the average lifetime value of your customers?
- What are your KPIs at each phase of the sales life cycle? (awareness, credibility, and trust)
Businesses pursuing effective online advertising campaigns must nurture customers throughout three core phases of their purchase journey: awareness, credibility, and trust. Each phase requires a targeted strategy to ensure customers encounter as few obstacles as possible in their path to purchase. It is important to note that the awareness, credibility, and trust phases of the customer journey are sequential in nature. A customer must have awareness of your product before they can assess the value of your offering through research, and subsequently achieve the trust necessary to make a purchase.
Define Success Thoughtfully
Certain types of ad campaigns are good for building awareness, but as a standalone marketing strategy, ad campaigns will not foster the degree of credibility and trust with prospective customers that is necessary to complete the sales life cycle. For example, suppose your business employs an ad firm whose strategic focus is to maximize traffic to your site. After the campaign launches deploying expensive advertisements throughout the web, your e-commerce site begins spiking in traffic volume. Is this campaign a success?
The answer, of course, is it depends. A marketing strategy of increasing site traffic does not holistically address the customer journey. Despite increasing online visits, many such businesses find that comparatively their online sales have negligibly increased. As awareness of your product increases, your marketing campaign may be failing to sufficiently prioritize and establish credibility and trust with your customers, resulting in low sales relative to traffic. Or perhaps, your website’s purchase process is too cumbersome once prospects arrive at your site. Is your marketing team evaluating whether the customers visiting your site are qualified? Does your marketing strategy center on meeting the needs of your average customer based on detailed customer profiling?
Effective marketing strategies rely on a tailored set of key performance indicators (KPIs) derived from customer data and research. The feedback from these KPIs facilitates the marketing team in rapidly pivoting their strategy as needed to optimize the flow of the customer’s journey. Not all KPIs are equally insightful. For example, while ad click through volume may be high, click through volume is a poor metric of the customer’s intent and product awareness in comparison to time spent on site, particularly in areas such as the ‘about us’ section. To the capture the complete data picture, businesses must ask a comprehensive set of questions that dig into the KPIs that are most important.
Measure and Adjust
Maximizing your customer’s experience through your online marketing strategy is a dynamic effort. Businesses must adapt at speed to their customers’ evolving needs. Doing so requires marketing teams to ask the right questions daily, so that the most appropriate adjustments can be made before revenue and funds leak away on antiquated methods and lost potential customers. Consider implementing the ArgonDigital ROI checklist to help your team stay ahead of the curve.
