Set up digital marketing campaigns that provide insights

Ever felt like running a digital marketing campaign takes a lot of effort in concept, design, implementation and running it, and when it comes to collecting results it's... confusion? Un-actionable metrics are there glaring at you wondering why it's not telling you much.

There's a key difference between metrics and insights: designing a digital marketing campaign takes a clear definition of what success looks like. What metric is able to measure it, and what counts as satisfactory results, what else needs optimization.

Insights are the intangibles that drip out of the right metrics, looked at in the right context and within the expected range. Metrics can often include noise or vanity, whereas insights don't lie.

Insights are produced where the actions and goals align, so that data can efficiently measure the result of an invited action in relation to its intended goal.

Let me give an example from a real-world case.

A real estate agent establishes a content strategy based on producing content targeting home buyers, based on the assumption that people in the market for homes are likely to search for advice and read about the evolving market. The content strategy includes publishing articles containing tips on the local area, new developments and regenerations, picking the right type of property, financing the purchase and insurance.

What type of visitor is more likely to convert into a buyer?

Certainly deeper down the funnel, people looking for mortgage advice are more likely to have a particular property in mind and can be converted quicker. A rating value is then assigned to each piece of content, and counted against each identified web visitor.

Based on the sum of points that each visitor has in time, the real estate agent triggers the most appropriate and automated action: sending out a printed brochure to higher ranking visitors, or engaging with further emails containing available properties for sale, in order to grow the score until the prospect seems to be ready for taking the next step.

What do I need to get this work for me?

The requisite to consistently gather insights from digital marketing campaigns is to design an algorithm, even a simple one, supported by the data schema. The data used and enriched while running the campaign needs to become the basis for calculating the key metrics and derive insights.

Key metrics like the click-through ration or the conversion rate, or higher level like metrics like the frequency, recency or page-depth, are only valuable in comparison to changes and optimization experiments. These metrics don't provide insights and can only be used in the context of specific experiments to improve. Each industry, product, time-based context, language and campaign type has its own metric to start with, and optimization can only be incremental and relative.

Working towards goals means setting the expectations and ways to measure when the expectations are met, and qualify the expectation by coming up with metrics that are specific to each campaign.

Setting up the data infrastructure and automations isn't easy, especially when working with disconnected tools that hardly communicate to each other. Also, the importance of keeping private information confidential is paramount and required by the recent privacy regulations.

Which digital marketing platform

There are many marketing platforms and they are all different. Some focus on automating email campaigns, others help building dynamic social media ads. In the context of integrating personalized web, email and sms communication only a few players like HubSpot and ReachOut App stand out.