Lets not think about it in a mathematical way, lets think about it in the context of measurement, and just making them the right way. This is how I like to put it, imagine wanting to get a suit tailored specifically for you – for a special event, the tailor will have to take your body measurements and meanwhile you’ll have to maintain the same body weight. You don’t want to lose or gain weight and make this suit not so fit on you. So it’s a process of maintenance! Even when the suit is ready!
Now, remember its not about tailoring this suit, its about your digital marketing campaign and presence! – Lets think about the measurements we need to take in order to improve and maintain your performance and effectiveness.
Here are three questions that I’m using this week to help you with measuring your success and maintaining it.
1- How to measure the effectiveness of web/digital marketing?
2- What are the process/ programs used to maintain and improve websites, social media presence?
3- How much resources should be put into improving and maintaining digital marketing? – COSTS!
I did my research to answer these questions and to make it easier for you I’m going to take you step by step to understand how to “take the right measurements”.
Here are my findings:
Firstly, I’ll talk to u about ‘How to measure the effectiveness of web/digital marketing?’
Watch this 3 minutes video by Brett Relander to get an understanding of the importance of measuring the results of your digital marketing strategies and campaigns. He also provides quick tips on how to do it, which I’m going to go in depth into them. Click here to watch the video.
It’s important to keep your attention to everything that’s happening to your business or company at all times. You need to know what’s working and what’s not in order to work on improving them, updating them and maybe eliminate things that are not working. It’s all about keeping your content, strategies and presence up to date.
According to a blog by ‘akabugeyes’ in a post called “Starting and Maintaining a website”, those are the most crucial points in the process of producing a website and maintaining it. Before I mention the points I just want to say that most digital marketing campaign and presence are based in a website and then companies expand to use email marketing, social media marketing and so on. But the main focus and the one that a lot of effort should be put into is producing a website that represents the company/business/brand.
Now here are the points:
- Establishing a Base: Drawing out and delivering on an effective concept.
- Providing Content: Communicating ideas by producing media to entertain and inform.
- Time and Commitment: Showing dedication and being responsible.
- Marketing: Spreading the word and staying true to yourself.
- Creating a Community: Bringing the concept behind a community to the World Wide Web.
- Ability to Adapt: Making adjustments in times of rapidly changing preferences.
- Analytics and The Hard Facts: Maintaining a website is not an easy task.
- Staying Secure: The Three U's: Update! Update! Update!
To learn about those points in detail, click here.
Moreover, Ben’s blog has a very nice way of explaining the importance of maintaining websites, in his post “The Process Involved in Developing and Maintaining a Website”
This is how he explains it:
Maintenance Stage
A website is built and maintained similarly to the way that a car is built and then needs to be maintained. Once your new website is live on the net, for the world to see, it needs to be maintained. If you never changed the oil, filters and tyres of your new car it would quickly come to a standstill. Website’s are dynamic entities that need to be changed, updated and improved over time. You need to add pages to them with new and exciting information to keep new and existing customers interested and coming back. You need to give people a reason to return to your website. A maintenance plan needs to be put in place for your new site.
You must also be willing to advertise your website. For example, include your website’s address (URL) on your business cards and company stationary, in print, radio and television advertisements. This will serve to direct people to your website and provides access to you or your business from within their businesses and homes. Simply having a website is no longer enough to ensure visitors and achievement of the goals of having the website. Remember that the day your site went live an additional 100,000 new sites also went live adding to the billions already live on the World Wide Web.
Furthermore, ROI is an important term in measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing.
What is ROI?
It’s simply, performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. To read more, Click here.
Now, why is ROI important?
Well, here’s the answer:
According to PotentInteractive, in an article called ‘How To Measure Internet Marketing ROI: The Four Basic Questions’: The success of an online marketing campaign is easily measured, even formulaic, if you just follow four easy steps:
QUESTION 1: WHAT IS THE GOAL OF YOUR SITE, AND WHAT PAGES MARK THAT GOAL?
Your web site has some value-generating goal -- something that helps grow your organization. These goals are usually in line with larger organizational goals, and may include:
o Generate leads.
o Generate interest in a product or service
o Get donations
o Inform/persuade the public
o Get votes
QUESTION 2: WHAT'S THAT GOAL WORTH?
Now the hard part -- what's it worth to your organization each time you achieve that goal?
We may not know, literally, the value of each campaign. But we know their relative effectiveness. The point here is you should always consider what your web site's goal is worth. Accuracy is important, but consistency is crucial -- as long as you can measure relative effectiveness, you can evaluate advertising effectiveness.
Regardless of your goals, make sure you understand their relative value.
PS: The calculations formulas are available on the original article web page – so if you’re interested pay it a visit! Click here.
QUESTION 3: HOW MANY TIMES DID YOU ACHIEVE THAT GOAL, AND WHY?
You know what your conversion goal is, from question 1. Now you need to know how often you achieve that goal. To do that, you need at least three out of the four basic metrics:
- Landings on a specific page or file.
- Where your site visitors come from.
- Conversions.
- Source of each conversion.
Measure any three out of the four metrics, and you can determine return on investment.
QUESTION 4: WHAT DID IT COST TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOAL?
Now you bring it all together. What did you spend to achieve your goal? If you're collecting all three conversion metrics, you're set. This could be not so perfect, but you can at least determine which Internet advertising assets are not providing value.
It's better to know for sure, on a conversion-by-conversion basis, what's generating value. But even if you don't know that much, you can at least do a gut check and know which ads are ineffective. Armed with that knowledge, you can make changes and see whether those changes improve results.
Now we know how and the importance of measuring the effectiveness of Digital Marketing. Lets move to the second question: ‘What are the process/ programs used to maintain and improve websites, social media presence?’
Its time to introduce ACRE! Or as the article I found calls it RACE. It’s a practical framework to improve you digital marketing.
What is RACE? – SmartInsights answers this question in article called: ‘Introducing RACE = A practical framework to improve your digital marketing’ By Dave Chaffey.
Here’s their answer:
RACE consists of four steps or online marketing activities designed to help brands engage their customers throughout the customer lifecycle.
Step 1: Reach. Reach means building awareness of a brand, its products and services on other websites and in offline media in order to build traffic by driving visits to different web presences like your main site, micro-sites or social media sites.
Step 2: Act. Act is about persuading site visitors or prospects take the next step on their journey when they initially reach your site or social network presence. It may mean finding out more about a company or it’s products, searching to find a product or reading a blog post. It’s about engaging the audience through relevant, compelling content and clear navigation pathways so that they don’t hit the back button. The bounce rates on many sites is greater than 50%, so getting the audience to act or participate is a major challenge which is why we have identified it separately.
Step 3: Convert. Conversion is where the visitor commits to form a relationship which will generate commercial value for the business. It’s where marketing goals such as leads or sales on web presences and offline.
Step 4: Engage. – Build customer relationships through time to achieve retention goals.
You may ask - Why RACE?
According to this article, RACE is a practical framework to help manage and improve results from your digital marketing. Ultimately it’s about using best practice web analytics techniques to get more commercial value from investments in digital marketing. We hope it will help simplify your approach to reviewing the performance of your online marketing and taking actions to improve it’s effectiveness.
HubSpotBlog mentions other ways of measuring the success of digital marketing through digital marketing.
Here they are:
1- Facebook Fans & Page Views
2- YouTube Video Views and Subscribers
3- Del.icio.us bookmarks of your website
4- Rank in Search Engines - Both branded and generic terms
5- Number of Articles on Digg and Number of Votes
To read more visit the original article. Click here.
Finally we reached the hardest and most important part of evaluating digital marketing and knowing how to maintain it. Its time for MONEY talk! $$$$$
Reminder: The question I’m about to answer is: ‘How much resources should be put into improving and maintaining digital marketing? – COSTS!’
I talked in one of my previous blog posts about how much it costs to develop, launch and maintain a website: ‘How To Deliver a Digital Marketing Project on Brief, Time & Budget?’
I’m going to talk about it briefly again, but for extra information click on the previous link to my previous blog post or visit SoloSignal.
For an interactive website with custom design and quality coding, I would expect to pay somewhere in the range of $2,000 to $15,000. If you are paying less, you are probably getting an off-the-shelf CMS with a generic design template. For more complex sites or online applications, expect to pay $20,000+.
What do you pay this money for?
· Details. Professional designers and firms pay particular attention to the details that will make or break your site.
· Time. Most people who end up using a professional designer or firm understand that their time is worth something, and that spending your time on your core business is one of the best places you can invest your time. Working with web professionals allows you to tap into our experience and knowledge and save hundreds of hours.
· Experience. A professional designer or design firm isn’t just selling you hours on a project; we’re selling you years of experience in the sometimes-overwhelming world of the Internet.
· Knowledge. When you hire a professional designer or firm, you are also getting access to a wealth of information that we’ve gathered and are happy to share.
I found another article on 720-Media, called: ‘Web Design and Website Maintenance Average Cost?’
Those are the costs of designing and maintaining websites:
Website Maintenance Rates
Small websites = $25 – $150 per month
Medium websites = $150 – $350 per month
Large websites = $350+ per month
Website Design Average Price
Average cost to design and develop a high quality website is $990 – $1,500 for small sites and under $2,500 for medium-sized websites. Price for larger websites is typically $3,500 and up. Our website packages include a phone training showing you how to manage the content and optimize your site for search engine optimization (SEO).
This website can also do the job for you so pay a visit and look at the packages they have, they’re Good!
Other than the websites, most companies should have Social Media Coordinators. I found some information about job vacancies and information for the US embassy at Haiti, on NewJobsCorner – A bit random but gives us an idea of the job!
Work Hours: Part-time; 20-30 hours/week
Salary: *Ordinarily Resident: 971,436 HTG p.a. (Starting salary) *Not-Ordinarily Resident (NOR): $50,043 USD p.a. (Starting salary)
Basic Function Of Position: Incumbent manages and maintains the embassy Website and all embassy social media outreach in accordance with State Department guidelines and regulations; monitors and evaluates the embassy’s on-line presence; and advises the Public Affairs Officer (PAO) and other embassy officers on effective use of social media for promoting US Government goals and objectives in Haiti.
Qualifications Required:
1. University degree in one of the following fields: Political science, International Affairs, Economics, Communication, Journalism, Business Administration or other related field.
2. At least four years experience working overseas with an international governmental or non-governmental organization with increasing levels of management responsibility.
3. Level IV (Fluent) proficiency in spoken and written English, French and Creole required.
4. Familiarity with USG procedures, rules, regulations and policy priorities.
5. Knowledge of and experience with word processing, spreadsheet programs, the Internet, electronic mail and social media.
6. Experience in development and management of websites and other social media tools, such as Facebook, SMS messaging, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Hi5, pod-casting and blogging.
Here are some extra websites/information about the 3 questions I answered:
- ‘How to Maintain your Website Successfully’ this article talks about maintaining websites in details (weekly, monthly and annuals tasks), it also talks about The Power of Analytics. Worth a visit!
- ‘Measuring Marketing Campaign Performance’ this article stresses the importance of Tracking and measuring the performance of integrated marketing campaigns. Also, it takes/shows you how to do it. Very useful.
- ‘The Web Marketing Checklist: 37 Ways to Promote Your Web’ I love checklists, and this is a very good one as you can see if you’re on the right track and measure you successfulness.
- ‘The REAL Cost of Getting & Maintaining a Website’ I think the title speaks for itself, this article talks about the costs in details. Has some REAL money talk! J
Hope this was useful.
Good Luck with Your Measurements!
Innas A.
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