Looking at your digital marketing budget, you likely know exactly where every dollar is going. Do you know, however, what each dollar is doing when it gets to its destination? In other words, are your internet marketing dollars being well spent?
Reasonably speaking, your marketing dollars are well spent if they are being used to target the appropriate audience and if they lead that audience to conversion. Thus, the efficiency of your digital marketing strategy can be defined by your level of success with targeting the right audience and leading that audience to conversion.
Is your internet marketing strategy hitting the efficiency mark?
Internet Marketing Strategy Best Practice-Targeting and Segmentation
The Forbes article "Creative Ways to Target and Prospect Clients" notes: "You should always be thinking about who could benefit from what you have to offer. When you combine creative prospecting with sensible qualifying, you'll be able to devote your time to helping those who are the best match for your business."
Sounds simple, right? So, how do you actually go about targeting your audience? The targeting process can be broken down into three main components: creating your buyer persona, segmenting your leads, and crafting a specific marketing message to each segment.
Creating Your Buyer Persona: For whom is your product or service designed? The answer to that basic question will give you the foundation of your buyer persona. Think about the type of person who would benefit from what you have to offer. Create a mental picture of your ideal buyer. This is your target audience.
Segmentation: In many cases, however, your product or service would be of benefit to a wide range of people. Thus, you will have more than one buyer persona to target. This is where segmentation comes into play. Segmentation is the process of separating your audience into different groups based on their particular needs. Using a variety of metrics, you can track where your leads are in the sales funnel, and design marketing campaigns to appeal to position-specific priorities.
Specific messaging: For instance, your marketing message for a prospect just entering your sales pipeline would be substantially different from your marketing message for a lead that has been qualified already.
For the purpose of marketing efficiency, it is necessary to understand that qualifying leads is essential to the process. The goal is to spend your marketing dollars on leads that will actually convert. This means that you must be careful not to cast too wide a net with a generic, one-size-fits-all marketing approach. Segmentation-specific messaging helps you narrow your focus to the leads that really matter.
Competition for Budget Share
With each department jockeying for a higher percentage of their organization's budget, it is necessary to craft a solid argument in order to get a better budget allocation for marketing. In many cases, the only argument that holds weight is a demonstration of the ROI of your marketing efforts. In general, the higher your demonstrated ROI, the higher your budget allocation becomes.
What metrics can you capture to demonstrate positive ROI for your digital marketing efforts? Using your email marketing strategy as an example, here are some of the metrics that will help you determine the success of your campaign:
- Email open rates
- Click through rates
- Form conversion rates
These metrics give a broad view of whether your CTAs are prompting the right sort of action on the part of your target audience.
Capturing detailed metrics helps you see which
of your marketing efforts lead to positive ROI.
Close-Looped Marketing for In-Depth Analysis
You may find, however, that these broad metrics do not give you the nuanced picture you need to really measure success or failure. Hubspot's "How Close-Looped Marketing Works" explains the concept of close-lopped marketing in this way: "Closed-loop marketing is marketing that relies on data and insights from closed-loop reporting. "Closing the loop" just means that sales teams report to Marketing about what happened to the leads that they received, which helps Marketing understand their best and worst lead sources."
How is close-looped marketing helpful? Oracle's "Marketing Effectiveness" notes: "By 'closing the loop' between a prospect filling out a form associated with a marketing campaign and that prospect becoming a customer, Marketing can report with confidence on the ROI of marketing campaigns - and demonstrate with confidence their impact on revenue."
Because close-looped marketing allows you to track everything that happens from the time a potential lead first interacts with your content to the time of conversion, it provides a more in-depth picture of the effect of specific campaigns.
Armed with this knowledge, you can tweak your marketing message, jettisoning the parts that do not lead to conversion and pinpointing the parts that move your target audience to decisive action. The result? A more agile marketing strategy and a more efficient use of your marketing dollars.
The Takeaway
Years ago when we formed Connection Model, we took our deep-rooted direct marketing principles and began to apply them to digital marketing strategies. Our clients liked the accountability we provided as it was a departure from what they were getting in the past. That is what Connection Model stands for, connecting the strategies and tactics and building ROI models that help make sound financial decisions.
To make the best use of your marketing budget, it is important to understand how each of your internet marketing campaigns is actually performing. This includes more than just knowing how much you are spending on your campaigns. It also involves comparing your spend with your ROI.
Effectively targeting the right audience and segmenting that audience to produce specific, highly focused messaging leads to increased marketing efficiency. Additionally, utilizing close-looped marketing strategies enable you to more confidently assess and adjust your internet marketing strategy as needed to achieve a positive ROI.
How do your marketing efforts measure up in terms of efficiency? Find out by requesting an assessment today.
Written By: Doug Milnor
