Assessing the efforts of digital marketing

I came across an interesting read on Pulse regarding how to analyze the effectiveness of one's digital marketing efforts. First, the article lays out a 5-stage process for the digital marketing roadmap, where stage 1 focuses more on developing customer personas and outlining the consumer's purchase journey and stage 5 focuses on the analytics of the digital marketing campaigns that have been run across platforms. The roadmap is an important one to keep in mind as certain steps need to be completed before others can be effectively executed, which the latter half of the article speaks to. Specifically, the article calls out a tendency for business to give into the pressure of moving too quickly, launching marketing campaigns that generate demand that cannot be satisfied from a UX perspective or even a UI perspective. Lastly, the article also highlights the importance of keeping analytics simple - the core business team should agree on the key metrics to measure three things: 1. awareness about your company; 2. how your core customer segment feels about the company/product/services offered; and 3. how much lead conversions are attributable to digital marketing efforts. It is surprising how difficult agreeing on these KPIs can be and how overcomplicated KPIs can be - there's always an abundance of data, but clear goals can and should be set. For example, if awareness generation is the goal, then impressions may be the main KPI that the team agrees to optimize against.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141007193250-3728092-how-to-tell-if-your-digital-marketing-efforts-are-in-the-right-direction