5 Steps To Evaluate Your Company’s Digital Marketing Strategy

Forbes

The thing about digital marketing strategies is that every company has one, even if you’re not the one actively controlling it. Even if you’ve never spent a minute on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or any other Web property, customer opinion is forming about your brand, based on mentions of your company’s name by individual users — or by your obvious lack of participation.

Because your presence on different digital marketing properties matters more than ever, it’s a good idea to take time out of your schedule to regularly evaluate how well your strategy is performing. Here’s how to do it:

Step #1: Evaluate your digital marketing goals.

The first step in any good digital marketing strategy evaluation is a thorough examination of the specific goals you’ve set for yourself in the past. (Obviously, if you haven’t yet created any goals, this is the first issue you’ll want to tackle!)

Digital marketing goals include items such as:

• The number of social shares your blog posts receive
• The size of your fan base on social networking websites
• Mentions of your brand name on social media sites
• The number of positive reviews left about your company on sites like Google Reviews and Yelp
• Inbound website visitors from social networks
• Total number of conversions resulting from social traffic

If you’ve previously set up goals, take the time to determine whether or not you’re hitting your target projections. Also, look to see if the goals you set in the past still make sense for your company based on its current performance. If necessary, revise your goals to accommodate new objectives or to account for changes in product/service offerings.

Step #2: Reexamine your target customer profiles.

In addition, it’s important to remember that any good digital marketing plan is founded on a series of well-constructed customer profiles that outline the specific types of people you’d like to reach through your campaigns. So while you shouldn’t launch a new marketing campaign until you have some idea of your target customer’s demographics, interests and Web activities, you’ll also want to continually develop this profile based on your newest data.

As an example, if you set out to target young men on Facebook but find that Facebook Insights reports the majority of your “Likes” come from middle-aged women, you may need to reevaluate all elements of your marketing campaigns to account for this new customer data.

Step #3: Take a look at your digital presence.

As you reexamine the types of customers you target, you’ll also want to periodically assess whether or not you’re actively participating on the right digital properties.

For example, suppose you’re in an industry that targets young women, ages 18-26. If you launched your digital marketing campaign before the advent of the social networking darling, Pinterest, you could be missing out on a potentially tremendous source of traffic if you never took the time to determine whether or not you’re active on the right sites!

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