Measuring revenue from your campaign can’t tell you everything you need to know about your customers. Factor in these soft metrics for a comprehensive picture of your digital strategy’s ROI.
Return on investment (ROI) may be the most important result of any digital marketing campaign yet focusing on that number alone may shortchange other softer metrics that can reveal how your audience interacts with your brand and help you build long-term relationships with new and existing customers.
Soft metrics can measure comments and shares on social media and the click-through rates (CTRs) of particular digital assets— your website, promotional e-mails, native and display ads, social media. Monitoring these can highlight the ways you’re successfully connecting with your audience while also pointing to where you may need to tweak your strategy.
Looking at hard and soft metrics together can give you a more complete picture of the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. After all, the less tangible gains you make at the top of the marketing funnel can prepare the way for real returns later. For example, your display ad or native advertising on the popular site of a premium publisher may make your brand top of mind— so that when a consumer is in the market for what you offer, your site is just a click away.
Measure your ROI on Three Popular Digital Channels
Social Media Advertising
Using social media as part of your marketing strategy encourages customer engagement and brand loyalty, reaches specific audiences, and spreads your message across multiple media channels.
- Measure audience engagement by counting likes, shares, mentions, comments, and retweets
- Consider social media’s impact on awareness of your brand and the familiarity of consumers with its distinctive qualities. Comments can be very revealing, helping you understand how your customers relate to your brand.]
- Use tools such as Social Mention to monitor how often, where, and how people are talking about you, alerting you to customers’ sentiments- are comments positive or negative? – and whether there may be a few passionate followers who talk frequently and fervently about your brand.
- Explore the reach of your marketing efforts by assessing how many clicks come from various geographic regions. Facebook and Twitter both offer free analytics tools for tracking activity on their sites.
- Examine how your social media strategy supports your website by measuring traffic coming from various social media platforms.
Native Advertising
When done well, native advertising- also known as sponsored or branded content- can seem to be part and parcel of the content on your customers’ favorite websites, closely resembling the news and feature stories they go there to find.
- Native ads can be quite effective. Recent research found that users exposed to a range of “branded content” average 69% unaided awareness and 51% persuasion. There was an additional strong benefit when the branded content was supported by companion banner ads, which boosted purchase intent by 17%.
- Native ads are increasingly popular with ad buyers, who purchased 74% more native ads in the first quarter of 2017 compared with a year earlier.
- Gauge the success of your native ad campaign by tallying CTRs. Next, measure how long users engage with your content and the actions they take after reading. Do they share, comments, or click through to your website?
- Measure whether traffic to your website or the number of people searching for your brand increases during your native ad campaign. This will help you assess whether your efforts are helping to build brand awareness.
- Monitor reactions on social media to your native ad campaign. Is the response positive? Do people understand the campaign and find it useful? You can set up a Google Alert to track when and how your brand is mentioned online.
Mobile Video Advertising
Mobile video advertising offers you a chance to connect with your customers on an intimate level through their smartphones or tablets.
- Mobile video viewing continues to increase– rising to an average of almost half an hour a day in 2017, a 35% increase from a year earlier. By 2019, 72% of all video ad viewing is expected to be on smartphones and tablets.
- Make sure your videos are accessible by tracking their placement and confirming that they can be viewed on all devices.
- Measure how many people are aware of your videos by assessing direct traffic, the number of clicks from referrals, and share from social media.
- Monitor the buzz generated by your mobile video ads. Look at how many people are commenting and sharing on mobile devices to get a sense of how many people are talking about your brand.
As you develop your marketing strategies, measuring metrics like these gives you a comprehensive idea of how your digital advertising is performing. With this information, you can adjust your strategy as necessary to increase brand awareness, engagement with your content- and ultimately, revenue.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Learn more about how to measure and assess your digital marketing strategy. Contact an NJ Advance Marketing Consultant today.