A few years ago Digital Marketing was considered by many to be a baby that would remain a baby for very long. Many advertising agencies set up ‘Digital Arms’ to satisfy the need of the completing a check box for their clients.
Fast forward to today. Digital Marketing is now serious business. Consumers are empowered and connected like never before and the trend is only in one direction – towards increasing investment in Digital Marketing.
How do you evaluate digital marketing?
As it is, it is difficult to measure the real effect of advertising on sales. A few companies have mastered this science but a large number of marketers do not have an answer to a simple question – How much does your advertising directly impacts sales? At least not in developing markets like India.
As a marketer and controller of significant advertising budgets once told me – “we spend crores of rupees on advertising and this is tracked by viewership, readership and ad recall tests. Research agencies are then used to also conduct field research on usage and attitudes and a positive shift towards the brand and away from competition are considered a good measure”. The same marketer had learnt that the report presented to the brand competitor by its research agency showed a positive move for the competitor and the report presented by the brands own agency to the brand showed a positive move towards the brand! So both parties seem to be gaining ground as per their respective agencies!
Digital Marketing on its own too does not have any major ‘Sales’ oriented benchmarking. One can see analytics and results of page views, page listing, and click through rates and infer the offline sales effect of these.
Some marketers view digital marketing results as this:
Number of keywords for which the brand ranks in the top 10 for natural search
Number of visitors to the website
No of Facebook ‘likes’
Number of times content published by the brand has been shared
Ranking of the website in the www world
Your brand online store as a tool to get sales as a result of digital marketing
While there are several inferences that one can make by tracking digital marketing results, one sure shot way of getting some direct return on investment is if the brand can make the consumer end their digital journey with a purchase of the brands products.
What better way to track purchase than to have an online store for consumers to buy from?
Digital Marketing professionals gain a lot by having a company branded online store to which digital marketing traffic is directed. Some areas are:
Get sales for your digital marketing spend.
Better and higher consumer involvement due to rich content and focus on product information.
Opportunity to track webrooming where website visitors may ultimately buy from a physical store or from another online marketplace or portal. Tracking this can give marketers an idea about the effect on sales.
Customer information made available to the digital marketer to conduct research and gain insights.
Customers who have made purchases can also be involved by the brand on a long term engagement program for continued loyalty.
Ecommerce quotient of the organization through exposure to online sales, understanding of consumer web behavior and learning of processes and key elements of ecommerce.
Summary
Every brand that spends money on digital marketing should consider setting up and operating a Brand Online Store.
The Brand Online Store should be the point where the consumer digital journey end and culminates in a sale.
This will take digital marketing accountability to the next level.
For more information on how to set up your brand online store please contact the author-
Ajay Miglani
Or please contact us at info@kankei.com or WhatsApp +91 9324747575 or click here