Digital marketing assessments are fundamental elements of achieving a good return on investment for your marketing strategies while advertising online.
Here’s what you should know about them.
What Is A Digital Marketing Assessment?
A digital marketing assessment is an in-depth examination of your existing marketing effort online.
This includes evaluating your performance on social media, any blogs, your user experience, ongoing SEO efforts, and forays into other advertising mediums.
The digital marketing landscape is complex, so it’s important to perform an occasional examination to fully understand not just how your ads are doing but what prospects for growth you have, what metrics make sense to measure, and what the business owner should expect from digital marketing in the future.
What Does A Digital Marketing Assessment Look For?
A digital marketing assessment looks for analytics and other information that will explain your current digital marketing strategy.
Better assessments also evaluate things like your organic search performance on each platform, all aspects of UX, and what potential customers likely think about your company.
The main focus of a digital marketing assessment is looking for places where you can improve.
Most companies have areas where they can do better on any advertising platform, but without knowing where those areas are, it’s hard to reach your full capability.
This is especially true with the growth of marketing automation driving advertisement campaigns.
In simpler terms, a digital marketing assessment looks at where you are and where you could be.
What Are The 5 Ds Of Digital Marketing?
The five Ds of digital marketing are digital data, digital devices, digital media, digital platforms, and digital technology.
Together, these five elements form the core of all online marketing efforts.
Digital data covers the information your business has about customers.
Such data includes things like interactions with your business, audience profiles, buying habits, and even geographic locations.
Knowing who your best customers are can help you decide who to market to next.
Digital devices include the ways that people can get online to see your ads.
People use smartphones differently than desktop computers or gaming consoles. Some ads only work in certain areas.
Digital media covers various communication channels that you can use to deliver ads to customers.
That includes regular online ads, email, search engine results, and so on.
Digital media is less comprehensive than digital platforms but covers many areas those platforms don’t reach.
Digital platforms address comprehensive marketing systems that already exist, separate from digital media.
Major social media platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook fall under this category.
Platforms can offer additional insights and ad targeting opportunities, but they aren’t the sum of people’s interactions online.
Digital technology covers the tools and techniques you can use when advertising.
This ranges from building websites and apps to ad-creation software.
How To Evaluate Marketing Efforts
The best way to evaluate marketing efforts is to have a professional digital marketing agency do it.
Companies have different technologies, setups, and focuses, so there’s no single way to evaluate existing efforts.
However, there are some common principles that apply to most businesses.
How Do You Evaluate Digital Marketing?
Most companies can use analytics to evaluate the overall performance of digital marketing.
Evaluation involves setting metrics and seeing how much the marketing contributes to it.
Collecting data can show you how often people engage with ads and which of them become customers, allowing an impressively precise look at success.
How Do You Measure Advertising Effectiveness?
Measuring advertising effectiveness depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
Some companies use advertising to build up brand recognition, with sales as a secondary concern.
Other businesses are trying to sell directly, so advertising effectiveness is a percent of viewers that ultimately become customers.
Context is important here because some businesses set unrealistic expectations.
Most industries see a click-through rate on ads of less than 2% through Google, and display ads can be under 0.5%.
This data means that maybe one in two hundred people will seriously consider the ad, and becoming a customer is even more challenging.
Anything that’s too far below these numbers means there’s room for improvement.
It’s hard to do significantly better than the average, but meeting it is possible for almost every industry.
How Do You Evaluate Marketing Performance?
Marketing performance is not the same thing as advertising effectiveness.
This involves collecting information about factors like brand awareness, customer acquisition, website traffic, and lead management to see if all parts are operating smoothly.
In other words, advertising effectiveness focuses mainly on the return on investment, while marketing performance checks how well each area is working.
Both are important because you need to know how much you’re making, but also which areas have the most potential for improvement.
What Is A Marketing Needs Assessment?
A marketing needs assessment is an evaluation of your marketing performance that explains how and where you can improve.
This is the most valuable tool for many professionals because identifying the problems with lead generation and resolving them is often more profitable than planning entirely new marketing campaigns.
Most marketing needs assessments are relatively quick, but they can take weeks or even months if you have a sufficiently complicated setup.
That said, once you set things up to track information, performing needs assessments in the future gets significantly easier.
What Does A Marketing Needs Assessment Look For?
A marketing needs assessment aims to explain what you need to achieve to reach a particular goal.
For example, if your email campaigns are underperforming, a needs assessment will identify whether hiring better designers, changing software, or both is the best way to improve.
Marketing needs assessments will also examine areas like your brand and messaging, the ability to do strategic targeting, and the execution of marketing processes.
For smaller companies, a marketing needs assessment will evaluate other impediments and suggest ways of resolving them.
In an ideal world, businesses could spend any amount on marketing.
Realistically, companies have limits on what they can put into this.
A marketing needs assessment can identify whether you should hire new people, automate processes, or outsource some aspects of your marketing to other companies.
Why Is Marketing Assessment Important?
Marketing assessments are crucial because they allow content marketers to figure out cost-effective strategies for improving.
This applies to traditional marketing, social media marketing, email marketing campaigns, and other lead generation techniques.
It’s not always easy to do a marketing assessment.
A CEO may not like hearing that the company is off-course and needs to make major changes to succeed.
However, since a marketing assessment focuses on resolving potential problems and helping achieve specific business goals, it’s always worth listening to.
Common Issues Uncovered In A Marketing Assessment
Here are some of the common issues that marketing assessments uncover in companies.
1. No Strategy
Some companies have no comprehensive strategy for their digital marketing, just a collection of ads and an expectation that the system will make it work out somehow.
A marketing assessment will help identify marketing goals that you can apply to all of your digital advertising.
2. Missing Resources
Missing resources mean that you can’t achieve your full potential with ads.
This could be as simple as spending more money on those ads or as complex as hiring new employees with different digital marketing skills.
3. No Flexibility
The digital advertising landscape changes regularly, so what worked ten years ago may not work today.
Being too stuck in the past and failing to adapt can ruin a business, so learning how to navigate constant changes is vital to your success.
4. Demonstrating ROI
Proving a positive return on investment is vital for digital marketing.
If your campaigns are working, this can convince executives to give more budgets and resources to the marketing department.
If you can’t prove your worth, getting the resources you need becomes much harder.
Steps to Take After Assessing Marketing Needs
The key steps to take after assessing your marketing needs are about resolving them.
Acomprehensive digital marketing assessment is complicated but not hard for a professional agency that can coordinate with you to deliver results.
Instituting company-wide changes, in contrast, is much harder.
The most important thing to do is trust the results of the assessment and decide how to apply them.
A good assessment doesn’t just say what to change; it says why your company is falling behind in a particular area.
Once you know the problem exists, resolving it is a matter of will.
Final Thoughts
If you haven’t done a digital marketing assessment recently – or worse, ever – now is the time to get everything on track.
yorCMO is ready to give you an expert consultation tailored to the unique characteristics of your business, then create a customized plan addressing everything from your company culture to your corporate objectives.
Once this assessment is done and you implement the feedback from it, you can expect rapid, significant improvement in the results of your digital marketing campaigns.