With the growing importance of digital marketing, many marketing professionals are faced with the task of convincing finance to permit them to shift more money into online marketing activities. Finance, on the other hand, is more concerned about metrics and the return-on-investment that digital marketing will bring. The important thing here is to bring in a new set of metrics, which will clearly show the hard-hitting impact digital marketing has on business, regarding leads, conversions and profits.

Previously, digital marketing professionals only had to cite reach and frequency to get their budget approved. This was because ads that were displayed more often, usually garnered more sales. However, today, the over-saturation of ads on various media has resulted in most consumers choosing to ignore almost all of them, resulting in such ads having little or no effect on the choices of most consumers. This is especially true of display ads, which frequently do not result in any significant rise in profits.

Hence, digital marketing professionals should focus on the actions performed by users, such as their search habits after viewing a particular ad. This will help them draw a better relationship between the digital marketing strategy they have planned, and the impact seen on the business, allowing easy comparison of the effectiveness of different marketing tactics. Once finance can clearly see which digital marketing tactics are giving the best return on investment, they will have no problem shifting the required spend in the right direction.

If a marketing professional has included different digital marketing tactics within their strategy, but is not seeing results, what should he do? If you consider ‘digital’ as a philosophy, you will be able to use the common metric of user actions to compare the relative business impact of each tactic with the others. This also means that marketers should focus more on the needs of the customer, asking themselves the following questions:

• What information do searchers require?
• What key phrases are they using to find this information?
• Which sites are they visiting to get this information?
• Are they aware of the product/service being marketed?
• Is there something that is preventing them from making a purchase?

Once a digital marketing professional determines what the ‘missing links’ are, they can plot customer needs, and the correlated marketing strategy, accordingly. Lucrative opportunities and redundant activities will soon be revealed, helping one to create a more optimised digital marketing strategy.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.