Today, businesses understand that digital is the way forward and are willing to spend a big chunk of their budget on digital marketing. They are creating content, doing SEO, putting stuff out there on social media, and yet a lot of them don’t see a tangible effect on their bottom line. What’s wrong?

In my experience as a marketer, I have seen a lot of companies simply trying a bunch of random strategies and hoping that people will find them and start doing business with them. When that doesn’t happen, they lose trust in digital marketing and conclude it’s not for them. And obviously, if you are a CEO, you would be wary about investing in something that brings no result.

So What Should You Do?
It is the “spray and pray” approach that renders digital marketing strategies ineffective for most businesses. So if digital marketing isn’t working for you, it’s probably due to lack of planning and unrealistic expectations.

The biggest challenge lies in understanding what works so it can be repeated. The beauty of digital marketing is that it’s measurable. The scary part? You need to try, measure, and repeat till you find the strategy that works — it can be time-consuming and frustrating. I have seen far too many companies stop their efforts prematurely.

As a CEO, you need to realize the risks of falling into the trap of thinking that digital marketing is not for your business. Abandoning digital marketing channels in an era where your customers and competitors have gone digital is like shooting yourself in the foot — it can spell doom for your business!

Instead, you should be looking at marketing concepts and metrics which make a real impact on the profitability and competitiveness your company. Let’s discuss some of the most important ones.

Customer Acquisition

Just by investing in digital, you cannot expect clients to show up on your door. You have to be strategic and methodical in your approach. The good news is, I have already done the legwork for you with this 6 step customer acquisition formula that works for all my digital marketing strategies.

Step 1: Define a lead magnet. Identify who your ideal customers are where they are and what they will buy.

Step 2: Email nurturing through auto-responders. Give your ideal prospects a sense of value you can create for them through targeted emails.

Step 3: Tripwire. Make your prospects a part of your sales funnel by letting them experience your product/service throughan attractive offer.

Step 4: Selling core product or service. At this stage, your prospects should be ready to buy your core products.

Step 5: Profit maximize.This is where you upsell/cross sell the customers who have bought your products/service with high profit margins.

Track and Measure
A big takeaway from this discussion is that — brands and organizations that are willing to spend time to learn what works for them are the ones to gain most from investing in digital marketing. And, the first step towards that is to install the following tracking codes in all the pages of your web assets:

• Google Analytics with Goal Setup
• Google Retargeting Code
• Facebook,Twitter, and LinkedIn and Pixel

Quite simply, web assets are any items on your current website that may be generating website traffic and allowing your site to rank in search engines.And setting up the tracking will enable you track how an activity on your website can translate into business.

KPIs to Watch Out For
Here some key digital marketing indicators that every CEO should be keeping an eye on.

1. Website visits – A website visit doesn’t tell you much about the success of your marketing efforts or about the purchasing intent of the visitor, but if you are able to track its sources it can help you understand which of your efforts are yielding the best results.
2. Traffic sources -Being able to track traffic sources allows you to identify which channels are driving maximum people to your site — organic SEO, email campaigns, paid ads or social media. This will give you a clearer view of what’s working for you and what’s not.   
3. Customer Conversion Rate from each source – You can gauge the success of a digital campaign by measuring the conversion rate, which is the percentage of the people who visit your site and convert or in other words, create a sale.To calculate this, divide the number of website visitors that a marketing effort or a campaign has generated, by the number of sales conversions created through the landing page CTAs.
4. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) from each source -As the name suggests, this metric tells youthe average cost of acquiring a new customer.You can calculate it by dividing the sum of all marketing and advertising costs (plus salaries, commissions and bonuses)over a specific time period, by the number of new customers acquired in that same time period.
5. Return on Investment -Lastly, the most common metric to measure profitability — ROI. You can calculate it by dividing the net revenue earned by the total cost of digital marketing Investment.

Keeping a close watch over these key metrics will help you have greater visibility into your digital marketing campaigns and whether they are delivering real ROI for your company.

But it’s not all that easy to set up and track these metrics. You need to have the basic understanding of digital marketing along with knowledge about the latest tools and techniques.

That’s where our Corporate Training Solutions help you. Through this course, we equip you with the basics of digital marketing and acquaint you with all the latest tools and techniques as well as the best industry practices, giving you a much more detailed insight about many of the concepts we have discussed in this blog post.

A glimpse of what one of our trainees has to say about our mentor and trainer, Sharan Kulkarni and the training he received from him: