Today’s Digital Marketing Landscape

The world of digital marketing is getting more complex with an increasing number of channels (web, email, social, mobile), customers and prospects are broken down into small communities in different channels, for example, they move from Facebook to smaller and intimate communities such as technologies like WhatsApp, Vine, WeChat, Snapchat and many others). In short, the job of the digital marketers is ever challenging.

I think that sometimes the focus is directed too much towards the channels and the attention is given to see what’s new out there and make sure we’re reaching out to customers and prospects in all channels without real objectives behind what we want to do with the clients (does increase in followers = success? Does it translate to revenue?).

Rule #1: Channels are channels and not objectives. They’re there to facilitate customer engagement while linking it to our (often quantifiable) objectives as digital marketers.

Then, what are the key digital marketing goals you most probably ask?

There are 3 strategic objectives that digital marketers need to set and measure in order to generate revenue.

The 3 strategic objectives are:

  1. Convert leads into buying customers
  2. Increase the LTV of your customers
  3. Win-back inactive and lost customers

Let’s look at the customer lifecycle and its journey from a lead to a churning customer. The chart above explains the journey visually, and thus are the strategic objectives:

1. Convert leads to customers

Most of the budget we invest in digital is directed towards acquisition strategies. SEO, PPC, Facebook ads, banners, affiliation, etc. The true objective is to take the leads we invest so much money in, and convert them into buying customers.

We need to measure how much money we spend on each channel against the conversions we have. If we do not do that, then our acquisition strategy is merely a hobby. Assigning monetary values to each channel and looking into conversions, is often called attribution[1]

Which is why we want to measure the increase in conversions against our actions while assigning desirable targets. E.G 20% of my leads are converted into buyers each month.

2. Increase LTV

Given the investment we’ve made in acquiring the customers, every sell we will have from now onwards will yield larger gross margins (the purchase cost doesn’t include the acquisition costs anymore). And hence what we want to do here, is look into the increase of the spent from our existing clients and make sure they are retained. Here you need to look into increase in the average purchase from your clients, and increase in their engagement metrics (more visits, increased time on site, review of products, etc).

3. Win-back

The third and last objective is trying to pull back the customers who churned or are inactive toward the centre of the customer lifecycle, so that the pool of customers we have will churn in a slower pace (twist it, turn it, customers will always churn. The best you can do is delay their churn).

I am not going into the tactics used, but looking at the strategy, you want to measure win-back ratios (churning customers – churning customers who purchased again) and work against improving this number.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately in many companies today (more in the B2B offline), marketers are in charge of marketing, and sales on sales. In my opinion, marketers are the super heroes of the digital space, and are essentially the sales force responsible for revenue. By sticking to these objectives and measuring against them, we’re ensuring our efforts are directed towards the bottom line. You can now look at different channels, campaigns, etc. but make sure that everything you do is attributed to one of these goals.

And as soon as you can quantify success in these objectives to your efforts, see your boss and ask for a pay increase.

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Learn how Emarsys can help engage your customers across channels to drive revenue. Until next time, stay tuned.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_(marketing)