In 2023 Own Your Digital Marketing and Track Your KPIs

For many small business owners, wearing the multiple hats needed to run the business includes being your own Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). This means you have to make critical decisions about your marketing strategy, and we don’t think “no strategy” is the right approach. After all, whether paying a monthly fee for a website and email address or a full-fledged ad campaign, you need to know whether your return on investment (ROI) is net positive or negative.

What is Digital Marketing?

If it’s electronic and references your business or brand, it’s probably marketing. This includes “static” items like your email address, website, and pages on other platforms like Google Business Profile, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It also includes dynamic items like newsletters, blogs, ad campaigns, or other marketing techniques that are regularly updated or run for a limited duration. All marketing has a cost, including the time it takes to manage it. The ROI calculation determines whether a particular aspect of your marketing leads to new business. Obviously, being reachable by email is essential for a modern business, but everything else is optional. But no business is going to survive if it doesn’t use some sort of marketing. In fact, most marketing experts agree that limiting your digital marketing to one form, such as social media, will not provide ROI. Businesses need to use as many marketing funnels as possible (i.e., social media, website, SEO, email blasts) and track them to ensure they are following the marketing stages.

Digital marketing follows a well-known path in four stages: the marketing funnel. It begins with awareness, where prospective customers learn about your brand’s existence. Second, a customer considers purchasing the product or service. Third, the customer decides and buys, which is called “conversion.” Finally, in the loyalty phase, the customer repeats their purchase and promotes your brand to their network. A brand’s goal in each stage is to 1) attract, 2) inform, 3) convert, and 4) engage customers and how that aligns with ROI.

Unmonitored Marketing May be Causing You Harm

Once you engage in some form of digital marketing, it’s important to do it right first and keep an eye on performance. For example, a business website needs to be free of obvious errors (technological and grammatical), and it needs to be checked regularly to ensure that it is running smoothly. Similarly, a lack of information in Google Business Profile might make it seem like you are not open for business, which could drive your customers to the competition. Finally, if you are investing in a marketing campaign, if you don’t track the ROI, you may send good money after bad.

Essential Tracking Steps

As with any industry, digital marketing has its share of acronyms, and key performance indicators (KPI) are a big one. The benefit of digital marketing is that it is possible to amass important data to decide whether your efforts are paying off. If you send out an email newsletter, you can track email opens, how many people follow any links to your website, and whether any special offer in the email leads to new or repeat buyers. In fact, with any marketing you do, you can verify whether or not it is leading to business. This table sets out the KPI tracking that you can do with different marketing campaigns.