How effective is your marketing? [4 techniques for success]

Audit your digital media effectiveness to build stronger campaigns and an efficient marketing funnel

Reviewing your use of digital media is a crucial starting point for creating or optimizing your digital marketing strategy. But how do you tune in and prioritize what’s working, and what isn’t, without getting lost in vanity metrics?

At Smart Insights we recommend using VQVC to consolidate and streamline how your measure your digital media. This mnemonic shows how volume, quality, value, and cost help you pull out different elements of your marketing activities. Read on to find out more about VQVC and other important digital media planning techniques

Moreover, do you really understand how and when each of your key marketing communications is being received by your target audience? Our RACE Framework helps thousands of marketers around the globe track and optimize their key digital media, to get the best results possible, without breaking the bank. That’s why we recommend structuring your plan around RACE.

In this practical and actionable article, we’ll explore some quick and simple ways of reviewing your digital media channels and strategy.

1) Reviewing digital media channels across your customers’ lifecycles

It all starts with reviewing each of your channels! In this article, we will talk through the aspects of reviewing your digital marketing effectiveness and we recommend doing this for each of the following digital channels:

• Search marketing/ organic search
• Online PR
• Social Media Marketing including optimizing your presence
• Online partnerships including affiliate marketing and sponsorships
• Online display advertising, for example, ads you may have running on the AdWords display network and well as retargeting and social media ads
• Opt-in email marketing

Use the RACE Framework to plot your use of digital media across your customers’ lifecycles through reach, act, convert and engage. Our ‘structure a plan using the RACE planning Framework’ module in our RACE Practical Digital Strategy Learning Path will guide you through the step-by-step process of implementing the RACE Framework.

2) Review VQVC measures across all channels

The best way to get started is to include VQVC measures for each channel, VQVC is:

• Volume: Number or % share of site visits
• Quality: Dwell time or conversion rate to lead or sale
• Value: Revenue per visit (Ecommerce) or Goal value per visit (if goals set up for non-Ecommerce site)
• Cost: Cost per visit/lead/sale

It takes time to accurately pull together these figures, but if you don’t know the figures how can you improve? VQVC can be very helpful for comparing digital media activities, or for channel benchmarking against competitors, for example, those with similar media budget spend.

3) Opportunity Strategy Action

This section, for each of your channels, is all about understanding exactly what your success factors are for each of your channels. What are your opportunities? What strategies will achieve your goals? What action is needed? It’s best to include:

1. What would you like to change? What is to be changed and what does change like? remember this is just a high-level view, specific detail and campaign aspects are not required at this stage.
2. What does success look like? It’s good to know this to understand at the end of the year whether you’re strategy has been successful, this is hugely helpful for when you’re doing this audit all over again next year.

4) Overall priority and value compared to other channels

This section is all about reviewing how successful each channel is compared to each other, but specifically about how big of a priority this channel is for meeting your business objectives.

For example, you may feel in the year ahead you really want to expand retargeting and display advertising but cut back on Facebook Ads as ROI has been low. The value aspect allows you to explore how much value you feeling you’re getting from this channel. Is your SEO delivering or does it need improvement? Maybe your keywords are too specific and competitive and therefore paid media performs better? Our ‘select media investments’ training module in the Campaign Planning Learning Path should set you on the right track for prioritizing the best channels for you.