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Many online marketers get too wrapped up in measuring data that, though useful, is not the most important for understanding how your website is performing as a marketing channel.I say that because each investment of your time, money, and people should have a very solid ROI expectation attached to it. Without ROI, there's no pot at the end of rainbow, so you have to focus on those activities/metrics that provide the largest gains.Therefore, here are five online marketing metrics you should be looking at every day....
Secrets to millennial marketing success? ... Fromm recommends small businesses constantly make “little bets,” taking small risks on novel products and services that might hit big. “If you’re going to win with millennials, you have to temporarily suspend your notion of ROI and EBITDA,” he says. “You have to make little bets and see if they win or lose in the real world. Test things that are way beyond your definition of normal and see if they work. Technology allows you to do that every day.” Social channels will tell you quickly if your wagers are effective or not. “The little-bets theory is based on the fact that millennials are willing to experiment because it’s part of their adventurous DNA,” Fromm says. “And if it’s a hit with millennials, others will follow.”...
A recent study conducted by the online marketing firm Vertical Response and reported on in Forbes concludes that small businesses are spending more time on social media but struggling with the added workload it represents. Perhaps as a consequence, most are doing social media marketing in a vacuum because they’re not tracking results, which means they have no way of quantifying if their time and effort are paying off. “Our survey confirms that small businesses are understanding the value of social media,” says Vertical Response CEO and founder Janine Popick. “They’re spending more time doing it, and investing more money into it at a faster rate. But the extra work will likely lead to time management issues, especially for the small business owner who’s handling social media on top of all the other responsibilities of running a company. This implies that small businesses are in need of tactics and tools now to help them save time.”...
Discover how social marketing tools like Commun.it, BlogDash and Traackr can help you identify, connect with and engage industry influencers.... This month, we learned that although 65% of brands participate in influencer marketing, just 10% of total digital marketing spend goes to social, which includes influencer marketing. Some have cried, don’t people see the opportunity? Why aren’t they spending on influencers! Technorati Media’s 2013 Digital Influence Report shared the above insight, as well as the fact that a mere 6% of social spend is allotted to marketing to influencers. This doesn’t signal a problem to me at all. In fact, it’s an indication that while influencer marketing is recognized as a valuable piece of the online marketing puzzle and many practice it, it doesn’t require a great deal of budget to accomplish. That, friends, is what we call an opportunity. That’s not to say influencer outreach is easy, but that an array of low-cost tools are available to help marketers better identify, understand and connect with industry influencers. These social tools enable us to automate much of the research, to weed through a mass of data and identify trends or common characteristics among the people who can positively impact our business with a tweet, a blog post, or a thoughtful comment. Check out these social tools for brand marketers looking to more easily and inexpensively measure and act on influence in their industry....
... To become an empowered social business is to inject the advantages of social media directly into the heart of your corporate DNA. That means recognizing it’s not only about having a fantastic Facebook page or a high profile Twitter account (though that might be part of the plan!). It’s about implementing the benefits social technology offers through the fabric of your business- not just the consumer facing ones. What social networking tools provide is a way to break the divides that separate your employees and their expertise from customers and one another, fostering a climate of knowledge sharing and collaboration. Instead of isolated knowledge hives, you build engaged communities who relate and share with one another naturally. It’s about building a social corporate culture where innovative solutions naturally arise by a foundation built on trust and a love of sharing, a business of conversation and mass participation....
In 2012 there was a mad rush from companies to understand the value of social in all its complexities. What could social media do? What value could it provide? How could the company engage with its users? As a result there have been numerous traditional agencies suddenly becoming digital marketing specialists and providing their clients with complete social strategies. There have been promises of guaranteed followers, likes and shares which may or may not have been achieved. There was (and still is) so much jargon that many businesses were sucked into the social media marketing black hole. Please note that many of those were successful and marketing teams breathed a sigh of relief as Directors, CEOs and other high-ranking officials nodded their heads in appreciation of the high number of followers, likes and shares. However, unlike their marketing counter parts, these high rankers have a goal that must be met – ROI. Return on investment is difficult to measure from a social media perspective. What is the value of a like, follow or share? Can it be equated to the lowest possible sale value of a single unit of product? No – because for every 10 likes only one user purchased the product! This is just an example, but remains true in essence....
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Overall usage on social media platforms is exploding. Millions and millions of consumers are expressing likes on Facebook, tweeting about products on Twitter, and pinning on Pinterest every single day. Retailers and brands are therefore increasingly focusing their attention on social commerce. But, many struggle with the question: how do you convert a "like," a "tweet," or "pin" into a sale? In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at successful examples of businesses and business models for generating commerce via social media-based strategies, analyze Pinterest's success as a social commerce platform, look at Facebook's potential as a social commerce contender, and examine the e-commerce conversion and order value gap. Here's an overview of the converging trends that promise to transform social media into a viable commerce platform....
If you work in digital, you're probably getting a bit tired of the ROI question by now. We are all tasked with justifying our pitches and projects with proving where the ROI lies directly. ...Since it’s physically possible to buy from the place that you’re running your digital campaign, we’ve assumed that this is how we judge success. That’s where we’ve gone wrong, and where we will keep going wrong. We’ve thought that because you can just be a click away from buying a product or converting on a website, if users don’t do that straight away, it’s a failure. So the ‘trust’ remains in costly methods such as TV, which will never be expected to prove this because they can’t. Buying Behaviour To understand this, we need to think about the process of how we buy something versus what we engage with online. A recent study released by Invodo found that consumers are 174% more likely to buy something after watching a video about it online. While this is a wildly encouraging figure that will probably need to be toned down a bit, this finding in itself is significant. The fact that we’re more inclined to buy something from a brand after engaging with it online is what’s important. An increased likelihood to buy is all that should ever be asked of an online campaign, particularly one that is content led. To force a transaction at that point, or to judge that as an indicator of success is detrimental....
Unfortunately, like other marketing channels out there, social media, is still not without its own set of growing pains. Most businesses today commit critical and costly mistakes when setting up their social media marketing campaign. So to help you, I’d like to discuss the top 3 mistakes in social media marketing and ways you can avoid them so you can get the biggest return for your marketing investment....
Many marketers today are looking to increase their Facebook fans, LinkedIn memberships and/or Twitter followers. Social media marketing is a new buzz-word in both b2b and b2c domains. But, when it comes to engagement, how easy is it to measure the engagement-level of your Facebook fans or LinkedIn Group Members? How easy is it to interact with them and nurture them? How easy is it to get usage and engagement metrics out of Facebook, LinkedIn et al? Is it even possible? Can you act on the metrics? External social sites are good for brand-building (or reach) but not for interaction or engagement. A recent Gartner report cited that a mere six percent of marketers claim that marketing on social networking sites is their top priority. What is even more powerful is that 45 percent of those surveyed said corporate websites were key contributors to marketing success. And from the customer perspective, four out of five customers claim to visit a website for product information and only a mere 19 percent would visit a Facebook page, according to Incyte Group....
The problem with social media ROI... While Social Media treats ROI as a mostly mythical creature that people like to read about in hypothetical scenarios, real-life companies are struggling to actually track the ROI of their social media marketing efforts. Consider these statistics that NectarOm (Nectar Online Media) published in a recent study in collaboration with the Socia Media Clubs: Out of 400 people surveyed, 73% do not even track the ROI of their social media efforts. Of the people who do attempt to track the ROI of their social media marketing efforts, 46% said it was not a major driver of revenue. Let’s think about this in the context of the InfiniGraph e-book. They suggest that a single campaign may involve a company spending $5,000 in Facebook ads. Based on the NectarOM study, most companies would not even make an effort to track the return on that $5,000. The companies that would track the investment would, for the most part, find that their ROI was poor return....
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This is a great article to read for anyone involved in any part of the marketing field. Not only does it give the five online metrics important to monitor when having a company website or blog, it explains why these metrics are necessary to take into consideration. The author explains the need to focus on how engaging one's articles or blogs are by how often guests return to the site, how often viewers become customers, how much guests click around to different parts of the site and more.
This article goes right along with my current internship. I deal with product descriptions and write blogs for my company. It has made me aware that I am not just writing this description or blog because my boss tells me to, but rather to engage our potential customers by making them love our site and want to come back again.
Never before has there been so much data accessible to marketers and website designers. The key is to understand what the important metrics are, what they are telling you and then taking the initiative to act and monitor the results. This article does a good job of highlighting some key website meterics and what to do about the results.