Three ways to improve your digital marketing performance

Measurement

Regular data collection and analysis is a key pillar of digital marketing and needs to be carried out wherever your brand is active. This can often mean ensuring you’re across reporting requirements for Facebook, Google Ads, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. The list could be endless, and measuring the channels against one another isn’t always easy to do. For example, if you’re a company targeting ads on Facebook and LinkedIn at marketing professionals with 5+ years’ experience, it’s likely that you’ll reach a more relevant audience on LinkedIn, where the targeting is more detailed. But what happens if Facebook delivers a far better CPC? Does the value of your LinkedIn traffic compensate for the higher ad costs? Or should you simply chase the cheapest clicks available?

One way to determine the value of your campaigns is by setting up and tracking performance in Google Analytics. Here you’ll be able to determine how many clicks actually turned into web page visits, how much time people spend on your site, how many pages they visit, and whether their visits result in meaningful conversions. Information like this is helpful because if you’re seeing a lot of clicks from a PPC ad but only 50% of clicks end up as web traffic, perhaps you have a page-loading issue. Or – to go back to our marketing professionals example – if you see twice as many visits from Facebook compared to LinkedIn, but the LinkedIn visitors spend 3x longer browsing the site, then maybe your money is better spent improving and developing your LinkedIn presence.

Establishing a process of integrated cross-channel reporting not only helps you to see the real value each paid campaign brings, it also helps you decide which formats are giving the best ROI, and which channels are working the hardest for your brand.

Messaging

Delivering a clear and co-ordinated brand message is key for paid and organic digital marketing across multiple channels. This doesn’t mean writing two or three ads and delivering them across five different mediums; what it means is establishing your core brand messages, your must-have campaign messages, and then finding the best way to deliver across all of your channels.

Campaign or product messaging can be a powerful tool. For example, did you know that in 2019 Google searches for ‘iPhone’ were made 30% more often than searches for ‘Apple’? Brand is important, but understanding what people want from it and the methods they use to search it is vital. Delivering a consistent message across your paid media not only boosts awareness and shapes perception of your brand, it also carries the potential to create new opportunities through expanded search terms, in turn creating a kind of domino effect within your integrated strategy. Creating that consistency relies heavily on your ability to use each channel to its fullest potential, which leads us nicely on to…

Mindset

No two social media channels are alike. No two search engines or websites work in the exact same way. So understanding and adapting to the nuances of each becomes an important part of delivering integrated campaigns. Imagine you’re a company which sells recipe-box subscriptions; you have killer campaign creatives and a clear CTA message – can you adapt and deliver both across all your paid channels? Does your campaign work as six-, fifteen- and thirty-second video ads for YouTube and as a text-only PPC ad? Are you better off delivering your Twitter ads by sponsoring blog posts written by guest chefs? Can you deliver your campaign message purely through carousel ads aimed at foodies on Instagram? Maybe you’re considered a market leader on one channel and unknown on another – is it worth developing an organic content plan for the latter to support your paid ads?

While each channel is unique, it’s also true that nothing exists in a vacuum. Campaigns should be tailored for each channel, not changed completely. People use Twitter for different reasons to Instagram, and advertising that works wonders on Facebook might fall flat on Snapchat. It doesn’t mean your campaign can’t work for all four – but it does mean your goal should be to deliver an agile campaign that works anywhere and integrates itself into the ecosystem of each of your chosen channels.