Measure What’s Important, Not What’s Convenient - Levelwing

Business owners and their marketing teams are holding themselves back from success. That’s right; it’s them and no one else. That’s because they’re holding fast to easy-to-obtain convenience metrics. So what is a convenience metric? It’s a number that “conveniently” grows and gives the appearance of a successful campaign. On social platforms, convenience metrics are things like number of followers or fans and post likes. Sure, these metrics can give us an idea if our content is share-able or popular, but it doesn’t paint the entire picture of your social success. After all, why is your business on social? To show how much people like your photos? Probably not.

More than likely, your business is involved in social media to grow your business opportunities through leads or sales, create brand awareness, engage current customers, market to potential customers, implement better customer service tactics or various other similar reasons. Though convenience metrics are predominantly a social media problem, they also exist in other forms of digital marketing. For example, how many clicks did my paid search ad get? How many people viewed my webcast? These metrics are not painting the entire picture of a successful campaign and can cloud your judgement of digital success and further optimization.

So how do we combat getting lost in the vast ocean of convenience metrics? It’s simple, really. Align your business goals with your digital marketing goals. Let’s say for example that you sell B2B software. A tutorial video you uploaded to YouTube got 60,000 views in a week. Great, right? Well, not necessarily. How many of these views resulted in a visit to your website? Of these visits, how many performed an action, whether it was filling out a lead form or purchasing your software? Of the people who purchased, how many shared their purchase with friends or wrote a recommendation/review? These are all much more telling metrics than your 60,000 views. And chances are, the numbers that answer these questions are much, much smaller.

This all sounds quite negative, I’m sure. Can’t you just let me be happy that my business has over 80,000 likes on Facebook? But the truth is that as soon as you align your digital strategy with your overarching business goals, you will begin seeing growth in the metrics that matter and that will impact your business’s return on investment . In keeping with the proverb, anything worth having isn’t easily obtained. Therefore, I challenge you to go after the metrics that will move your business forward instead of languishing in a pool of clicks, likes and shares.

This content was syndicated with permission from Asking Smarter Questions .

Steve Parker, Jr. is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Levelwing, a digital advertising agency that provides data-driven marketing solutions. Steve can be reached at sparker@levelwing.com. Follow me on Twitter at @sparkerjr.

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