How effective is your digital media?

Audit your digital media effectiveness for better campaigns

It’s an important step in creating your digital marketing strategy and it’s always important to review the effectiveness of your digital media channels. Every time you’re updating your digital marketing plan, it’s a great idea to take the time to review your digital marketing channels – it’s time to ask yourself questions such as do you know your VQVC measures for each channel? And what are the priorities to improve your digital media campaigns? In this practical and actionable article, we’ll explore a simple way of reviewing your digital media channels and strategy.

In our digital marketing strategy workbook, you’ll find a helpful table on page 37 which can help you to audit your digital media effectiveness.

Start with reviewing all of your channels

It all starts with reviewing each of your channels, in this article we will talk through the aspects of reviewing your digital marketing effectiveness and we recommend doing this for each of the following digital channels:

• Search marketing/ organic search
• Online PR
• Social Media Marketing including optimizing your presence
• Online partnerships including affiliate marketing and sponsorships
• Online display advertising, for example, ads you may have running on the AdWords display network and well as retargeting and social media ads
• Opt-in email marketing

Include VQVC measures across all channels

The best way to get started is to include VQVC measures for each channel, VQVC is:

• Volume: Number or % share of site visits
• Quality: Dwell time or conversion rate to lead or sale
• Value: Revenue per visit (Ecommerce) or Goal value per visit (if goals set up for non-Ecommerce site)
• Cost: Cost per visit/lead/sale

It takes time to accurately pull together these figures, but if you don’t know the figures you can rate each of them, for example great, good, average or poor

Priorities of success factors

This section, for each of your channels, is all about understanding exactly what your success factors are for each of your channels and which specific areas you would like to improve. It’s best to include:

1. What would you like to change? What is to be changed and what does change like? remember this is just a high-level view, specific detail and campaign aspects are not required at this stage.
2. What does success look like? It’s good to know this to understand at the end of the year whether you’re strategy has been successful, this is hugely helpful for when you’re doing this audit all over again next year.

New communication techniques to trial

In this section, you can review the communication techniques you’d like to trial for each of your channels. For example:

• Social Media Marketing: Improve use of the profile, including sending messages to LinkedIn group and commit to 2 LinkedIn articles per month
• New nurture sequence for customers who have not been active in the last 6 months.

This is a high-level section exploring the new techniques you’d like to trial, it’s also a great reference for when you do this audit again in a year. It’s not best to mention previous trials, though this should be noted somewhere along with success factor, but going forward you should be reviewing the opportunities you can take advantage of. The VQVC aspect will help you understand how successful messaging has been previously.

Overall priority and value compared to other channels

This section is all about reviewing how successful each channel is compared to each other, but specifically about how big of a priority this channel is. For example, you may feel in the year ahead you really want to expand retargeting and display advertising, but cut back on Facebook Ads as ROI has been low. The value aspect allows you to explore how much value you feeling you’re getting from this channel, is your SEO delivering or does it need improvement. Maybe you’re keywords are too specific and competitive and therefore paid media performs better?