How Effective is Your Online Marketing Strategy?
Most people say they gauge the results of their online marketing strategies for their virtual stores by the increase in traffic, the number of clicks to “sponsors” or by their page rank. Is that you? If that is your strategy for gauging effectiveness then read the following five points and learn why it might not be the best way to gauge results.
1. If you have an online store and you are gauging your marketing effectiveness by how many clicks to your affiliate sponsors you garner then you are definitely on the wrong track. First of all your main business is to sell goods. Affiliate marketing is another area entirely. Your efforts should be focused upon selling your goods, not a competitor’s goods.
2. Increases in traffic may be an excellent way to gauge the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives under some circumstances. However, if you are selling cool baby clothes, diaper bags or cute clothes and your visitors are all seeking cool gadgets you may have missed the marketing boat. Increased traffic numbers with visitors that hit the back button as soon as your page loads may not be doing you much good.
3. Social media marketing is a hot topic right now. Establishing a business presence on Twitter and Facebook may be an excellent idea for brand recognition and even gathering leads. However, you have to assure yourself that your followers are seeing frequently updated content that has a bearing on what you sell. You have a hot new set of cool baby clothes, a sought after shipment of diaper bags or some super cute clothes just in; use that opportunity to inform your followers of the new shipment and even show a photo or two. You might use increases in the number of followers or the number of likes to gauge the effectiveness of your social media marketing, but these initiatives only work if you are sending out a positive and frequently updated message about your products through the social network.
4. Page rank as a gauge to the effectiveness of any online marketing strategy works if and only if the page rank is accompanied by numbers and traffic. Basically, what an online store wants is targeted visitors looking for their products. Therefore, if traffic hasn’t increased it is either early in the campaign or the campaign, SEO or marketing push needs tweaking.
5. It takes time are you giving it time? Business, sales and traffic are not something that is pulled from the air on the internet. It takes time for a marketing and SEO strategy to show its full potential. Checking your server stats the day after you begin an initiative is good for establishing a baseline. However, it may be weeks before you begin to see the result in full or even months.
The true gauge of a marketing campaign’s effectiveness is usually seen in the form of sales. The bottom line is why a retail store begins online promotion of their products. Trying to measure it too soon is an error and measuring by the wrong standards can be misleading.