Use KPIs to Measure Your Digital Marketing Success
Having a marketing strategy is important but how do you know your efforts will lead to success?
“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
― Stephen R. Covey
Luckily there are measures you can take to ensure you are on the right path to achieve your marketing goals.
In the marketing world, we call it Key Performance Indicator (KPIs). These metrics do more than just help you understand your marketing efforts are being spent in the best way. But looking at the right ones helps you to realize where those efforts can be optimized. This blog post is written to help you better understand these numbers and which KPIs to track.k
What are KPIs?
When you’re driving you need to have more than just a destination. There are other important metrics such as speedroute, and fuel level.
In this example, we could call those the Key Performance Indicators of your travel. As important to be aware of the direction, speed, and fuel level during a road trip is to look at how close – or far – your marketing efforts are to getting you to achieve your strategic goals.
The Basics of KPI Tracking?
One of the gaps between digital marketing and traditional marketing is the number of metrics – or KPIs – you have access to.
To understand the difference we can look at one of the most famous quotes about traditional marketing, coined by one of the most notorious marketers – John Wanamaker.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.
Businesses have always had goals and objectives, and so had key performance indicators – KPIs to measure their success. What digital marketing did is to make it possible to understand not only who sees your ad, but also how many times they’re presented to the same person, and even which call to action drove more results.
How to Choose the Best KPIs to Measure
Now you know that you should spend your time and energy measuring the KPIs that are relevant to your strategic objectives. But there are other important factors that you should consider when choosing the most relevant KPIs.
NOTE: your business objectives come before any KPI. You choose the best KPIs based on your goals
Everyone who is involved in the marketing team or project should be able to understand what the KPIs measure straightforwardly. Ensure you will keep it simple.
Since the KPIs’ purpose is to guide your marketing efforts and help you optimize where there’s space for it, make sure the indicators you are measuring are relevant. As mentioned before, there are uncountable data out there to measure any type of results you may have.
Consider this when choosing what you’ll be measuring: the ones to keep on track of are those that are directly related to your objectives.
As an example of a metric that can be relevant for law firms is the customer acquisition cost. Let’s say you’re advertising to get more calls. For every 10 people who see your ad, the advertising platform charges $10. From those, 2 end up making the call and becoming your clients. In this case, the customer acquisition cost is $5.
This metric could lead to a deeper understanding of where the ad budget is going and help to optimize the ad to decrease its customer acquisition cost.
It’s worth stressing that your metrics shouldn’t overlap one another. They should complement each other and be aligned with the goals you want to achieve.
Make sure your metrics will drive strategic action. There’s no reason to look at metrics that won’t make any difference in how you work towards your objectives.
It may be tempting to have as KPI something like “how many clients like us” but this isn’t very measurable. You can choose “how many new clients we get from referrals” instead. Have only measurable actions as metrics.
We’ve talked a lot about goals and being intentional when choosing metrics to measure your path to them. Your numbers indicate where you are heading to.
Defining the most simple, and relevant KPIs will get you one step further but looking at them multiple times a day will just make you anxious. Set a specific time frame to track them. Make sure to have a KPI report in place to take the most advantage of each analysis.
Different Channels, Different KPIs
Each channel plays a different role in your online presence strategy. This is why sometimes the best practice to get the picture of what’s working and how you can improve your digital channels is to have different metrics for different channels.
Getting back to the road trip example, you know where you are heading to (business objective), and the metrics to get there. But, the fuel level and the speed are measured using different units and you must be aware of it to land at your destination.
At our agency, we work across many platforms to get the best results for our clients. This means that we measure forms filled on the site using google analytics but we also look at Facebook ads that drove that website traffic.
Different metrics, different platforms but still aligned with the objectives the client has for each channel and measuring how close we are to the goals.
Wrapping Up
Many law firms don’t achieve their desired results when planning and executing their marketing efforts. The path to marketing success is to test, analyze, and optimize.
You can learn more about how to use social media as an ally to grow your firm in these other two posts:
What’s the Best Social Media for Attorneys? How to Conquer the Internet
Instagram for Lawyers: How to Easily Create and Optimize Your Profile
We’d be pleased to help you achieve your goals using the power of digital marketing. Schedule a call and let’s talk about your success.
