marketing optimization – Veronica Stenberg

How to evaluate your marketing investments

Veronica — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 07:00:49 +0000

When working with digital marketing during these precarious times it’s useful to ask a few key questions to ensure the right investments are made. Every penny counts and with the right set-up and questions you can ask your team or agency to help you identify the following:

Are you investing in the right audience?

What does the visitor do on the website after click-through – compare to cost of audience, conversion rate against purpose.

What investment in what channel is generating which result?

Look at the quality of the target audience – what they do on the website after the initial click? And against conversion, exit/bounce rate.
If you are able, measure against generated revenue from the visitors of the channel to determine the quality of the new customers from that channel.

What campaigns/ad groups cost the most?

Compare against purpose and evaluate if the investment is worth it, based on the campaign purpose. (Eg reach campaigns should be evaluated against reach of desired target audience and interaction on your website – conversion driven campaigns against conversions generated)

What are your most successful ads – and why?

What ads cost the most against the purpose of performance?
Look at the quality of the audience through website interactions or conversions, match against targeting.

What customers cost the most to attract versus their lifetime value?

Compare CLV against CPA on target audience and compare on channel level. This enables you to determine if you are investing in marketing towards the right customers.

Are your creative assets (such as ads) relevant to each target group?

By evaluating the CTR from who you target versus who clicks, and then converts. (Depends on purpose of ad or course)

Take it a step further

You can also ask your agency or team, to dive deeper depending on channel and help you identify on a more nitty gritty level such as keywords for search ads, time a day, devices, geography and so forth.

Should you need help with analysis, you can contact med through Nimble & co.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Marketing advice during COVID-19

Veronica — Mon, 11 May 2020 06:43:39 +0000

We are all navigating strange times at the moment at the best of our abilities.

During these times I’ve noticed signs of a stronger sense of community, the rise of altruism, creativity and the sense of contribution or the want to contribute towards something bigger outside oneself. That we are all in this together and with that many want to help out and do their part.

I hope these values and initiatives will continue to thrive and develop further once the world is on the other side of Corona.

I pondered what I could contribute with and with strong coffee and a couple of early mornings and late evenings I came to the conclusion that I can help to answer two questions for CMO’s and/or CEO’s.

One:

How do you even market to a new audience and serve your existing customers during such a challenging situation? And should you?

My answer is yes to that. With tact, etiquette and the right approach, you can actually find new possibilities during this time.

Two:

And the second question that I asked myself was if I had limited budgets available. What would I do? And what is crucial right now? So I could market my business and follow-up on each penny spent?

With that in mind, I identified a few relevant focus areas with actions I would take right now if I was a CMO or CEO to:

Get in control of marketing investments
Find new possibilities for audience expansion
Save time and ensure time is spent on only doing high impact activities and less administration
Ensure effective impact of the performed marketing activities
Ensure relevant, engaging and tactful communication
Serve existing customers and community with value during these times
Step up and act upon core brand values

This I compiled into a PDF and you can just follow this link to download my advice and conclusions with concrete actions for each focus area. (no email required)

How to create a KPi framework

Veronica — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 06:55:24 +0000

The key to knowing if you are investing in the right marketing activities and have a website that works for your business is to set your purpose and goals and have your customers pain points/needs and journey (as in path to purchase and beyond it) well defined.

Once you have established what your end goal with your maketing activities is (eg sale, lead etc) you can create a simple KPI framework that will help you understand if your website needs improving to investing and evaluating marketing activities which should follow the flow of the different states.

You will find weak points and be able to improve upon:

content
improve SEO
landing pages
conversions
marketing activities and material

A quick and simple way to do this is to use the following three areas:

Awareness
Engagement
Conversion
Loyalty/after care

See this as a framework to defining the most important questions you want answered on a regular basis and important enough to be monitored. The benefit of looking holistically and mapping this against your customers path to purchase, (eg. see, think, do and care – or any other preferred model) is that you look beyond the end goal of just generating sales.

In order to be able to improve your entire customer journey and your marketing activities you need to understand the said journey to be able to build relevant content for each stage, that means you cannot only focus on generating sales as a KPI, in order to get to the end KPI, in this case a sale.

Then you add KPI’s that corresponds with each area. For example:

Awareness: CTR in bought media, unique visitors, search on specific keywords such as your business name, reach in social media

Engagement: page visits (specific pages for this), sign-ups for newsletter, follow on social media channels, online brand mentions, return visits, time on specific pages, (pre-purchase) search on your business name + product, bounce rate etc

Conversion: lead or sale generated (value, average order value, etc) download of an app, document download etc. ROAS (be sure to add any agency fees into this calculation)

Loyalty: return visits, page visits (specific pages for this such as customer service, after care instructions etc) This can also be follows and sign-ups that you can track from people who have purchased from you (however in this case exclude them from the engagement section)

Add a further layer to this, perform the exercise per target audience that you target and perform the exercise specifically for each target group if you have more then one segment or use:

New/potential customer
Existing customer
(or your target groups if applicable)

If you want a simple KPI framework template to help you get started, I’ve prepared one for you here.

Action points

This is what you need to do in order to achieve this. If you know your customer and your website fairly well, you will have a draft ready within a few hours which you can refine, build on or modify as you go along:

Identify your customer journey, map it out using a simple model that works for you (for example see, think, do and care is straightforward and easy to follow and corresponds well with the above model)
Choose 1-5 performance metrics to track for each step – which is the answer to your questions.
Track through a report or simple Google Analytics dashboard, or anyway that works for you
Evaluate, optimize and improve upon both your website, media investment and modify the KPI framework as you go along