After you’ve signed on the dotted line and your marketing agency is ready to get to work, you probably have one big question: When will I start seeing results? A service agreement outlines all the activities your agency will take on, but how does that equate to actual dollars? When will you know that you’re getting a good return on your investment?
Long Term Strategies Lead to Long Term Success
Depending on the shape of your current marketing efforts, there’s probably going to be a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into launching your marketing strategy. That might include planning sessions, setting up various platforms, performing content and SEO audits, keyword research, website design and development, setting up paid search campaigns and much more. Sound like a lot? That’s because it is. A good marketing strategy has a lot of moving pieces—although it’s nothing a good agency can’t handle. The point is, to get your brand’s message out there, you need to have the proper foundation.
For our clients, this initial set-up period can last anywhere from a month to a quarter. If you’re not seeing your sales needle moving yet, be patient. You can’t move into a house with no floors, afterall. Following all of this set-up, your marketing team can begin producing meaningful content to attract your ideal customers. That might include blogging, creating premium content offers or developing email campaigns. As you stock up more and more content, you’ll start to rank better on search engines (SEO), and when people search for your product or services, you’ll be more likely to show up in their queries. Again, this requires a little bit of patience. It takes a while for Google and other search engines to find your site and a little bit longer to rank.
As you build up more and more content and other marketing assets, search engines will begin to index these pages. For instance, let’s say you publish a blog post and promote it through social media and emails. You’re probably going to see a lot of traffic within the first week of publishing, but then a pretty noticeable drop-off. Don’t worry! That’s not the end. If your marketing team did its job well, you’ll start to see more and more traffic to that blog post in a few months. That means search engines are recognizing how good the page is and think it will satisfy your audience’s questions. As you build more and more of these pages, your site will receive more traffic overall and the chance of lead conversion increases.
Set KPIs to Keep to Ball Rolling
There might be a lot about digital marketing you don’t quite understand. Hey, that’s why you hired the professionals, right? However, while we’ll handle the ins and outs of SEO and digital design, there are few thing everyone needs to understand and agree to. Most notably, your marketing strategy’s key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs should tie back to your ultimate business goals and help you establish your ROI.
KPIs appear in every aspect of the business world, and they’re just as important for your marketing strategy. You should discuss the KPIs that are important to your industry and set plans and goals with your agency to meet them. Some popular marketing KPIs include:
- Site traffic per month
- Search engine page rank
- Conversion rates
- Net promoter score
- Lead generation
KPIs should be measurable and tied to your marketing agency’s success. As you continue with your digital marketing strategy, your numbers might change, or even your KPIs altogether. No matter what your KPIs are, you should be able to see if your marketing efforts are effective and what needs to be done to right the ship.
Have Regular Meetings with Your Agency
It’s important to maintain regular contact with your marketing agency. For one thing, it helps avoid surprises when you go in for quarterly or yearly reviews. In these regular phone calls or meetings, it’s important to check in on KPIs and the longer term strategies discussed above. In many cases, your marketing agency can even build you dashboards that you can check on your own time.
And speaking of quarterly and yearly reviews, it’s important to make time for these discussions. We recommend scheduling these out at the beginning of your service year to avoid putting them off. In these meetings, you can discuss everything that’s been done over the time period and assess whether or not your KPIs are on track. One huge benefit to digital marketing is that nothing is set in stone. You can adjust and calibrate your strategy to better suit your goals. These regular meetings are the perfect time to analyze your marketing strategy and plan for continued success.
ProFromGo Can Handle All of Your Marketing Strategies and KPIs
From setting timelines and goals to executing every aspect of your digital marketing strategies, ProFromGo has the tools and the people to help you reach your goals. Learn more about our full range of services, or contact us to see how we can help your business engage with your customers.
