A recent report in Marketing Week highlighted research from Bellwether, stating that marketing budgets had been revised down for the second successive quarter. Total marketing budgets were reported to have risen slightly on Q4 2010 from -5.4% to -5.1%. However, bucking the trend were internet and search internet marketing (digital marketing), which were revised upward 9.3% and 4.3% respectively.
So why are firms more confident and committed to investing more money in digital marketing?
Digital marketing stands out over other tactics as powerful tools are available to manage and measure campaigns in real-time. Communications and marketing managers can use these tools to make changes or improvements to the whole campaign, including web content, Social Media activity or online advert placement and messaging. By allowing managers to make live changes to campaigns as data comes in, a campaign's effectiveness can continually be monitored so the strategy can evolve and improve.
For example, if you are running a campaign to drive potential donors to your site, with an objective to convert them to supporters, there are simple tools to manage the project. A Web Content Management System will allow you to quickly create a landing page with calls to action to direct website visitors to perform the actions that you want them to do. Then as data about the campaign effectiveness is received, changes can be made instantly to the website content. The data to analyse campaign effectiveness can come from analytics software. Where this is integrated with the Web Content Management System, managers can see how visitors arrive on their site, navigate around landing pages, where they click and what they do on the site. This insight can be used to make instant changes to help direct visitors to fulfil their goals.
Social Media monitoring can also be integrated with the Web Content Management System so that managers can see how these are driving traffic to your landing pages and how the landing page content is pushed out to Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg or Delicious. Leveraging Social Media successfully can lift conversion rates whilst ensuring your message is spread, this way you can engage with donors to maximise your campaign success.
Conclusion
Intelligent software can be used to manage the end-to-end process of marketing campaigns to maximise conversion rates. The power of digital marketing is that with the right tools, campaign effectiveness can be measured and reported on. Managers have instant ROI information as well as the insight to make changes to campaigns whilst they are live. This is part of the reason that digital marketing budgets are on the increase from traditional tactics that can be more difficult to measure and amend.
Want to know more?
GOSS are speaking at the Third Sector Digital Communications and Social Media Convention and will be hosting a workshop where you can find out more about how successful charities plan and deliver digital marketing campaigns, using web analytics, landing page optimisation and usability.
Posted by Pete Stevens, 5th May 2011
