What is Digital Marketing Success?

The four key factors to determining digital marketing success are essentially those elements that confirm you’re someone who can benefit directly from using digital marketing. Of course if you can’t directly benefit from digital marketing, all the SEO, eCommerce, responsive design, content marketing and repurposing, social media marketing, and branded Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads will be for naught.

Matching up with these four factors means you not only have a business to build, but want to do so, and are ready to take action.

1. Research & Development

Let’s begin with the first key factor, which is development and research.

Also known as “R&D,” research and development is the first, most important step to determining digital marketing profitability. Without a willingness and ability to engage in some type of higher-mind research and development, there’s no way to clearly identify what business objectives you’re hoping (and expecting) to fulfill as a result of engaging in digital marketing as an ongoing service.

Clearly defined business objectives allow you to zero in on specific needs (as opposed to wants or impulsivity) that can lead (whether directly or indirectly) to greater sustainability and profitability.

Some examples of business objectives would be needing to increase non-profit organization (NPO) donations by 15% within a six month period of time, or selling a property, increasing health club membership by 20% within three months, or increasing newsletter subscriptions by 2% percent within 30 days.

Even if you don’t necessarily reach a specific objective within a set deadline, you’re more likely to achieve that objective once you put it into place and decide to reach for it.

Research and development involves studying larger, more profitable and established industry competitors by examining their SEO (Search Engine Optimization), their practices and habits both online and offline, and marketing practices.

An experienced digital marketing specialist can shed light on this process; but basically it revolves around looking at up to three industry stalwarts to form a consensus view of best practices. In marketing parlance we used to call that approach “piggybacking” and in psychology it’s called “mirroring.” Olympic athletes have been known to study competitors for decades, just as those in other fields study masters of a specific craft or filed to better refine an approach and methodology.

2. Planning

Our second of four factors defining digital marketing success is deliberate planning. Now, what may sound like something you’d take for granted that small business owners, NPO (non-profit organization) founders, and startup founders, and entrepreneurs would practice by default “out of the box” is not the case.

When I worked as a certified business mentor for SCORE (a division of the United States Small Business Administration) for almost a decade, along with volunteering for other smaller NPOs, I quickly learned that no matter who the person contacting me was or what the onus of their central idea was, they all needed the same thing and all had the same problem: they wanted to accelerate growth yet had no idea how to get there. That’s not their fault: they’re new to business.

The fault, if any were to be assigned, would be on me if I assumed that everyone who should be engaging in ongoing digital marketing were doing so; or that anyone who should have developed a comprehensive plan for growth had one.

I use the term deliberate planning over just the word planning because it denotes a commitment to applying structured logic toward building a multiple-tier marketing plan where each tier or level also functions as a strategy. Where most people refer to strategy as synonymous with planning; the two are actually quite different: A strategy is a single line of thought or action, like driving a car to get from one destination to another.

A plan is much more layered and complex, like traveling the world by air, land, and sea by various modes of transportation in order to save money while consolidating resources and maximizing exposure to different aspects of world travel. One is very limited by its nature, and focused on one approach while the other is multi-faceted. Not all planning is deliberate or what we need to reach sustained, recurring profitability. We need a deliberately structured plan ensuring we reach our primary objective.

So factor two, deliberate planning, involves first developing a digital marketing plan that we can commit to. The plan must have multiple levels, that are also strategies for deployment. This is also done in conjunction with pinpointing specific primary business objectives we want to achieve.

For the sake of example, let’s say that we owned a small restaurant. We desperately need to increase customer patronage of our restaurant so more customers are coming in, placing orders, leaving positive reviews online, subscribing to our newsletter (so we can gain more email addresses to market and send promotions to and send event invitations to). We also want to rent our extra kitchen space as a co-packer, for special events, or for special cooking demonstrations and cooking classes.

The central objective is to increase revenue so the restaurant does not go out of business. That’s our end goal. The strategies are ways we plan to achieve that goal that fall within specific categories so we can plan and implement an organized plan. Based on the information we just discussed, we can say that:

• Leaving positive reviews is an indirect digital marketing strategy that would go under a strategy we could title “reviews”
• Customers placing orders online requires we use eCommerce. That would fall under a strategy category we could call “ecommerce.”
• Subscribing customers to a newsletter would be a digital marketing strategy we could call “newsletter.”
• Using the kitchen as a co-packer, for kitchen rentals, or private use could be called “offline kitchen use.”
• Using the kitchen to create video cooking demonstrations for YouTube (and other video-sharing social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram) we could label as a strategy called “video.”
• Sending out email notifications of special events would go under “email marketing.”
• Promoting these events through Facebook groups, Facebook ads, on LinkedIn, through Meetup.com groups, listing the events on local event calendars, could all fall under the strategy “event listings.”

And so on we could go creating strategies and sub-strategies for reaching our central objective, then mapping them out.

Ultimately, we would probably want to list our central objective and subsequent strategies (and sub-strategies) as a actual list and probably at some point in a visual representation of some kind whether it look like a football diagram or military campaign diagram or whatever looks and “feels” right for the organization or business. My example is not a robust marketing plan in and of itself, but a brain-storming approach to getting started.

3. Deployment

Next up is our third key factor toward digital marketing success, which is deployment. In the military, deployment is term commonly used to denote putting something into effect or into action for immediate use. In terms of building a successful approach to using digital marketing deployment means refining our digital marketing plan from lists to actionable steps we roll out in sequence.

To continue with the military analogy, each division within the military would deploy an “asset” depending on where and how it could best be used at a certain time and under certain conditions. It would be assigning approaches to the most appropriate methods for execution and then putting those parts of our plan into order of importance and priority.

An example of this would be determining that social media marketing is more cost-effective at this time than investing in print advertising or radio advertising, so while we could invest in print and radio mediums, we’re going to put that on a shelf for now for future consideration. That would further narrow our focus, more clearly defining our available assets and available strategies.

4. Review & Assessment

Our fourth factor is review and assessment. It doesn’t benefit anyone to go to the trouble of putting together a comprehensive, multi-layered digital marketing plan, refining that plan into strategies, deciding how we’re going to perform elements of that plan over time and prioritize approaches, then put that into action, without at some juncture reviewing our plan to ensure we’re receiving some pay off from our efforts.

We can measure Returns On Investment through what are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), that are ideally determined either before our digital marketing plan is completed or shortly thereafter before it’s being executed upon.

These KPIs would be how we measure success ratios or metrics. Examples could be a percentage of increased incoming phone calls from new customers, an uptick in general revenue over the course of 90 days (which is very relaxed and almost always going to happen), some movement of the needle that lets us see our efforts are bearing desired fruit.

Since they can vary from organization to organization, from situation to situation, it’s better to understand what they represent and their importance than trying to imagine more potential examples.

Ultimately the success of digital marketing campaigns rely on the business engaging in the digital marketing specialist’s services; and the level of expertise of that person.

If you have trouble viewing my super-cool relevant infographic, check it out on Dribbble and Behance.