Digital marketing has become increasingly complex in recent years. New platforms are developing every year that can potentially be a new source of leads. Algorithms driving the information that appears on search engine listings and social media feeds are constantly changing. Customer journeys have become more involved and complex to address the increasing sophistication of consumers. AI technology is changing many aspects of digital marketing. The wealth of data available is simultaneously an incredible tool to help drive success and an overwhelming beast that can create paralysis and derail your efforts. If this list has left you exhausted, you’re not alone. Digital marketing is truly a bottomless rabbit hole.
It should come as no surprise that this complexity has caused many businesses to be a bit all over the place with their marketing strategy. It’s common for businesses to “throw the kitchen sink” at their marketing efforts in the hopes that some of their tactics will hit the mark. Unfortunately, when your digital marketing strategy is disorganized, it can result in significantly poorer outcomes due to:
- Allocating your marketing budget to channels that fail to deliver the best ROI
- Failing to target the right audience segments that will drive high quality leads
- Failing to tailor campaigns to the specific needs of the audience segment being targeted
- Lack of alignment between your marketing efforts and your business goals
- Evaluating the incorrect data to effectively assess the success of your efforts
To avoid these issues, it’s critical to engage in a process called marketing optimization in order to ensure your digital marketing strategy remains focused on the tactics that will drive the best possible results.
What Is Marketing Optimization?
Marketing optimization refers to the process of continuously refining your marketing campaigns to improve the efficiency and ROI of your efforts. It’s a critical way to ensure your digital marketing strategy remains organized and cohesive, and it will make it easier to stay focused on the tactics that will deliver the biggest impact to your business. Without marketing optimization, your digital marketing strategy is likely to be rudderless and disorganized, causing your business to waste money on underperforming tactics while failing to leverage the opportunities that drive the greatest growth.
Effective marketing optimization requires you to carefully analyze every aspect of your digital marketing strategy to measure both its effectiveness and the value it delivers compared to the money you’re spending. By leveraging a data-driven approach to digital marketing, you’ll be able to understand the aspects of your strategy that deliver the best ROI, and which aspects are wasting valuable resources. You’ll also have a better understanding of the types of messaging that best resonate with your audience, and which channels to amplify your message on in order to receive the greatest impact. This information will help you keep your digital marketing efforts organized so that you consistently improve your results over time.
It’s important to understand that marketing optimization isn’t a one-time task. To continue refining your results so that you achieve the best possible ROI, you must constantly evaluate your data to identify changing patterns, areas for improvement and new opportunities to pursue. By viewing marketing optimization as an ongoing process you engage in each year, you can ensure your digital marketing efforts remain organized and focused on the areas that will deliver the greatest impact even as factors in your industry evolve over time.
5 Ways to Organize Your Digital Marketing Strategy and Maximize Your ROI
Proper marketing optimization involves a holistic approach that covers every aspect of your digital marketing strategy. When trying to organize your marketing efforts, make sure you address each of the following areas to ensure you achieve the best possible results.
Organize Your Goals to Create a Clear Digital Marketing Strategy
One of the primary reasons why businesses find that their marketing efforts are disorganized is because they lack a clear digital marketing strategy. Laying out a clear strategy is the first and most critical step to take if you want to ensure your marketing efforts remain organized and work to optimize the results you achieve. We recommend that you read our previous blog post on how to develop an effective digital marketing strategy for important tips that will help you get this process right.
The first step we discuss in the blog referenced above is to define your marketing goals. Without a set of clearly defined goals, it’s impossible to organize your marketing efforts into a cohesive strategy. When defining your goals, keep the following tips in mind:
- Make sure your marketing goals align with your overarching business goals – This alignment is critical to optimizing your marketing efforts
- Take a “less is more” approach that focuses on a few goals that are the most critical to achieving your overall business objectives – It’s much easier to remain organized when you’re focused on a few goals rather than spread thin trying to achieve many different goals
- Make sure your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) – Keeping your marketing efforts organized is much easier when your goals are extremely clear and actionable
- Identify the performance metrics that will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy – This will allow you to remain focused on the efforts that achieve the greatest ROI
Once your goals have been defined, you can establish a clear digital marketing strategy that will keep your marketing efforts organized over time.
Organize Your Audience into Segments
Another crucial way to optimize your marketing efforts is to focus on the needs of your audience. The ultimate goal is to turn these audience members into paying customers, so focusing on their needs is critical to optimizing your marketing efforts. But many businesses have a diverse audience with different needs, concerns, motivations and priorities. If you create a one-size-fits-all approach that seeks to address the needs of your entire audience, you’re likely to find that your efforts will miss the mark with a large portion of the people you’re trying to target.
This is why it’s critical to organize your audience into different segments. Each segment should share a common set of attributes related to their:
- Demographics
- Behaviors
- Needs
- Motivations
- Pain points
- Decision making process
- Preferred platforms to consume information
You should organize this information into a series of detailed buyer personas that provide a comprehensive picture of what each audience segment needs and the types of messaging they will respond to. This will allow you to organize your digital marketing efforts into distinct campaigns that address each segment’s specific needs.
Organize Your Marketing Channels Based on the Needs of Each Audience Segment
One of the greatest benefits of organizing your target audience into distinct segments is that it will help you to understand the places where each segment typically consumes information. There are many different channels and platforms at your disposal to reach your target audience and without understanding the places they seek out information, it’s easy to waste your time, energy and budget posting content on the wrong platforms. Similarly, choosing to post content on every platform available is typically not a good strategy and will likely result in greater disorganization that prevents you from getting maximum impact out of your efforts.
While it is generally a good idea to leverage multiple channels as part of your digital marketing strategy, it’s important to be thoughtful and targeted regarding the specific channels and platforms you choose to include in your efforts. When you understand the behaviors and motivations of each audience segment, you can prioritize the channels and platforms that will most effectively reach each segment.
While publishing high quality pages and blogs to your website is always a critical component of the information you provide to your audience, you should also use channels such as social media, email and paid ads to help this content reach the people who are most likely to become new customers. When you’re developing your digital marketing strategy, make sure to outline the specific marketing channels you’ll use with each audience segment so that you can create an effective plan that makes it easy for your audience to find the information they need where they’re looking for it.
Organize Your Content Marketing Efforts with a Content Calendar
Content remains one of the most critical components of every digital marketing strategy. It is the primary tool at your disposal to convey your brand messaging to your audience and establish your business as a trusted industry leader. But it’s also easy for your content marketing efforts to become disorganized in a variety of ways, including:
- The topics and subjects you cover
- The types of content you use to deliver your message
- The frequency which it gets published
- The platforms used to publish your content
One of the most effective tools to help keep your content marketing efforts organized is to create a content calendar. There are several different ways you can approach your content calendar – there are a variety of content calendar tools out there that can help manage this process for you, but you can also simply design your own content calendar using a spreadsheet. Whether you choose to use a content calendar software tool or create your own, make sure it allows you to organize the following aspects of your content marketing strategy:
- Content topics – Your content plan should focus on the subjects that are most pressing to your audience and that support your SEO goals
- Content types – Make sure it’s easy to identify the different content types used for each piece of content you publish (web page, blog, video, social media post, email newsletter, press release, eBook, infographic, etc.)
- Posting date – You need to publish content on a regular basis, and it’s important that your content calendar tool helps you manage the frequency of your new content posts
- Channels – It’s important to identify the specific channel each piece of content is being posted on (for social media posts, make sure you identify the specific social media platform being used for each post)
- Goals – Each piece of content you post should be purposeful and help you achieve a specific goal (improve SEO rankings, improve lead generation, establish thought leadership, etc.), and including this goal in your content calendar can help you keep your content marketing efforts aligned with your overall marketing strategy
Organize Your Data to Monitor Your Results More Effectively
Leveraging the data generated by your digital marketing campaigns is critical to refining your strategy and improving your results over time. But the wealth of data available to you can become overwhelming if it’s not organized properly, making it harder to glean the actionable insights you need. The following tips will help you organize your data to more effectively optimize your digital marketing results.
Categorize Your Data
Organizing your data into categories can help you track performance on deeper levels, making it easier to identify patterns. Some good categories to use when organizing your data include:
- Chronological Organization – Arrange your data by time (month, year, etc.) to track trends over time and measure progress.
- Product Organization – Group data about specific product lines together to better understand how these products perform over time.
- Hierarchical Organization – Using a tree-like structure with parent-child relationships (i.e., campaign→channel→audience segment) can help you simplify complex datasets for greater clarity.
Centralize Data
The data generated from your digital marketing campaigns will come from a variety of different sources. Depending on the strategies you implement, you may need to review Google Analytics data to monitor website and SEO performance, social media metrics to monitor the performance of your social campaigns, email marketing data to monitor the performance of email campaigns, or paid search metrics to monitor the performance of your paid ads. It can be helpful to centralize this data in one location so that it is easier to organize it and compare the results of your different efforts. There are a variety of ETL tools available that will help you extract, transform and load data from these different sources into one centralized system where it can be analyzed more efficiently.
Using a CRM platform is an effective way to organize your customer data. These platforms will pull customer data from a variety of sources so that you can segment it into different audiences and analyze the data. This level of organization allows you to gain important insights into the behaviors and actions of your customers so that you can create personalized campaigns that more effectively cater to their needs.
Group Data by Key Performance Metrics
Organizing your data based on the key performance metrics you’ve established can help you to more accurately evaluate how effectively you’ve achieved your marketing goals. Depending on the specific goals you set, you may want to group your data based on the following KPI categories:
- Awareness Metrics – Grouping data for impressions and reach can help you measure your brand visibility
- Conversion Metrics – Grouping data for conversion rate, cost per acquisition and other conversion metrics can help you evaluate the effectiveness of specific campaigns
- ROI Metrics – Grouping data for customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost and other ROI metrics can help you understand which segments of your audience and which campaigns provide the best value for your efforts
Automate Reporting and Analysis
You can use dashboards to visualize performance across campaigns and channels, making it easier to evaluate this data and gain actionable insights. You can also apply advanced analytics techniques such as predictive modeling to gain deeper insights into customer behavior.
Webolutions Can Help You Organize Your Digital Marketing Strategy for Optimal Results
At Webolutions, we often find that when we first start working with businesses, their marketing strategies are disorganized, making it hard for them to optimize their results. One of the most important ways we’re able to elevate the success of our clients is by helping them organize their digital marketing efforts. This organization is a core component of our exclusive Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach focused on helping you grow your business smarter, faster and easier.
This transformational approach to digital marketing reveals your true competitive advantage by uncovering what makes your business special and unique during an extended collaborative journey with your leadership team. During this collaborative journey, we’ll create a Market Positioning Action Plan™ that:
- Identifies the key marketing goals necessary to help you achieve your overarching business goals
- Organizes your target audience into segments and creates detailed buyer personas for each segment
- Develops a Brand Platform™ that defines your messaging and ensures it is conveyed clearly through every aspect of your marketing strategy
Your Market Positioning Action Plan™ and Brand Platform™ will then be used to create a customized digital marketing strategy that will achieve all the goals established at the start of this collaborative process. We’ll identify the best channels to leverage to reach each segment of your target audience, and we’ll create a detailed content calendar outlining all the essential content types and topics necessary to drive each of your digital marketing campaigns.
Our Real-Time Performance Intelligence Dashboards™ will also help organize all your data in formats that are easy to visualize, making it easy for you to see critical information and trends. This data allows us to accurately evaluate the performance of each campaign so that we can make the refinements necessary to continuously improve results over time.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.
