Yeah, so we’re writing another post on data. Today I wanted to talk about the single most important and equally most forgotten step for any online marketing or PR program.
It is really simple: get to conversion.
What is your end goal that you want your communications to accomplish? Don’t be shy about it. If you want sales, great: say it. If you want lead generation, awesome: but be clear. Then set it up as a goal in your web analytics package and measure it.
This is not brain surgery, yet it is so frequently missed.
No, this isn’t something just for SEOs or SEMs. This is for social media marketers, PR pros, and everyone in between.
There is a strange trend I have noticed that many PR or social marketing teams aren’t given access to their web analytics packages like Google Analytics or Omniture. Even worse, I have seen companies completely ignore their web analytics but dive into social data merely because it is new. This is backwards: without getting to conversion on your own website and tracking that, you have almost no business measuring anything else. If you think social media marketing ROI is confusing, it’s because you don’t understand basic online marketing ROI.
Of course, measure KPIs and show how they help your business holistically. But without a conversion attached to them, you aren’t doing your job.
If you are marketing a business online, you absolutely need to define a conversion from your activities and measure against it. It allows you to clearly see which of your activities are producing a desired outcome vs. guessing. Then, you can dial up the tactics that are working and reduce those which are not.
It is critical to accomplish this as it isn’t what you do, but what you don’t do that defines your online marketing success. There is elegance in simplicity and no need to do everything, just what’s effective. And side note: everyone can get to some sort of conversion, even businesses who do not sell products online.
If your marketing or PR team is still making excuses and unable to come up with conversion goals, you need a new team. If they don’t understand this, it’s time to train them up.
To quote Avinash Kaushik:
If you ain’t got no goals, you ain’t got nothin’.