Digital marketing attracts visitors to your B2B website through customer-centric content that’s SEO optimized. This inbound marketing approach not only helps prospects find you, but it also allows you to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.
As this article notes, only two things ultimately account for positive ROI: bringing more visitors to your site and converting those visitors into customers. With an inbound marketing strategy, you have data that demonstrates digital marketing ROI, as visitors move along the buyers’ journey. Tracing the path from marketing through sales helps you to accurately identify the course prospects take to becoming customers.
Properly optimized website pages, blog articles, social media and other content drive qualified leads to your site in a measurable way. Once you start collecting and analyzing this data, you can provide even more personalized, relevant and helpful content to improve your digital marketing ROI. By looking at the analytics, you can identify your buyers’ needs and understand what content pulls leads through the sales funnel.
When evaluating social media data, make sure that all shares, likes, and visitors contribute to your sales efforts. That means sending social media visitors to landing pages on your website where you can collect data and encourage them to move further along the sales journey.
Marketing automation platforms help you measure your digital marketing effectiveness. They allow you to view each asset in your inbound marketing campaign and report on its progress across all channels. You can also trace marketing channels and content offers to the revenue generated by your company.
Measure Your Digital Marketing Effectiveness
According to HubSpot, the following are important elements in driving visitors to your website and creating measurable visitor actions that help you analyze your digital marketing ROI:
- Keywords – Find the best words and phrases your prospects use. These are keywords they use when searching for solutions to their problems and challenges that your products/services can address.
- Page Performance – Select key SEO areas for optimizing your pages and generating quality inbound links. Then you can see detailed SEO metrics on page views, ranked keywords, inbound links, clicks and social media.
- Social Media Monitoring – Create monitoring streams of targeted contacts and view your history of interactions.
- Calls to Action – A/B test CTAs and track results to analyze clicks and conversions.
- Landing Pages – Capture inbound leads through your website with landing pages. Use automated analytics to see which pieces of content bring in the most viewers, where your landing page traffic is coming from and which sources convert into leads.
- Forms – Build optimized forms with custom fields for collecting data on your leads.
From the first touchpoint to the final sale, you can gather data to measure digital marketing ROI. With the right marketing automation tools geared to your specific targets and sales goals, you gain a wealth of insights. You know which keywords drive the best traffic to your website, which social channels engage with your buyers and how visitors become leads and leads turn into customers.
How are you measuring digital marketing ROI? Share with us in the comments below.
All marketing tactics should be thought of as part of a larger whole, rather than separate pieces. By strategically integrating all marketing tactics, the marketing program becomes more effective and cost efficient. As a B2B agency, we developed B2B 360 Integrated Digital Marketing to meet this improved performance need. To learn more about B2B 360 and how it will benefit your business, download our free eBook: The Better Path to Top-Tier Tech Marketing.
Lisa Goetz is a public relations executive at Schubert b2b, where she primarily writes content and manages media relations. She brings 20 years of editorial and communications experience to Schubert b2b and holds a PhD in English literature from Duquesne University. When not in the office, Lisa likes to take excursions with her husband and hang out with her cat and a good book.