Too often businesses focus on the wrong numbers when it comes to analyzing their digital marketing strategy. Unless you are a company that directly monetizes online engagement, the numbers of likes and impressions your posts receive are nothing more than leading indicators about what is capturing your potential customers’ attention.
Time and time again at Tulip Media, we see new Client-Partners fixating on the number of likes and comments their Facebook posts receive as a direct measure of success. This can severely distort their perception of overall performance. Of course, engagement with your social media pages is important, but at the end of the day, these likes and comments don’t translate into any real revenue. You’re not making money off the number of Facebook likes you have or the number of comments you got on your latest post. When companies focus on leading indicators instead of real conversions, they lose sight of the bigger picture: sales.
What you should be looking at as a measure of success is the number of people who contact your business to inquire about or to buy the product or service you are selling. That’s where you are driving real sales and making real revenue, so that should define your true measure of marketing success. Those are the metrics that matter.
You also need to be mindful of the relationships between important metrics like leads and conversions. A few weeks ago, I was in a strategy meeting with one of our Client-Partners and I asked them how many leads they were getting each month. I was impressed when they told me they were getting around 40 leads each month. However, when I next asked them how many of those leads were converting into paying customers each month, they didn’t know. I was a bit taken aback by this because without knowing the number of conversions, tracking the number of leads is far less useful. If you don’t know what percentage of leads your business is converting, then how can you know if your digital marketing strategy is working?
By the end of the meeting, we had developed a new strategy that included tracking both leads and conversions so we could assess their marketing initiatives and make changes as needed.
Perhaps you are reading this and realizing that you’ve been spending too much time analyzing leading indicators in your digital marketing strategy instead of tracking real conversions and relationships between the metrics that matter. Today, I challenge you to turn your attention away from the impressions, engagements, and likes your digital ads are generating and focus instead on the number of conversions such as phone calls and contact forms your business is receiving. How many of these are turning into paying customers? How could you modify your marketing strategy to improve those figures?
If you need help turning your approach around, our team of experts here at Tulip Media would love to help you shift your focus. Visit us at TulipMediaGroup.com to learn more about the marketing programs we offer. We’ve turned hundreds of businesses just like yours around with a targeted marketing strategy, and we’d love to see what we can do for you.
