Posted By Industrial Web Solutions Marketing Team on June 29, 2010

Manage Online Campaigns with the Right Performance-Based Metrics

Heidi Cohen, one of my favorite digital marketing experts and ClickZ contributiors, recently published 25 Digital Media Questions Marketers Need to Answer. This excellent article is a must-read and offers invaluable insight to help you develop ways to embrace the new challenges in online marketing.

Cohen identifies the three marketing hurdles digital media must overcome as:

1. Expand Reach
2. Improve Advertising Effectiveness
3. Drive Engagement

It’s not that these hurdles are necessarily new but the approaches to overcoming them must be performance-based and demonstrate a clear understanding of the behavior of your target audience groups. Heidi writes, “Tina Sharkey of BabyCenter pointed out, it’s important to be present when and where prospects and consumers are discussing needs related to your product offering.”

Without a doubt you need to discover where your target audience groups are spending time online discussing either your products/services or the types of products/services you offer. To improve overall advertising effectiveness, Cohen suggests “behavioral targeting where relevant ads pop in a non-targeted context.” The idea is to avoid ad fatigue by reaching at least some portion of your target audience group in an environment that doesn’t offer hundreds of ads selling what you’re selling. It really is important to be represented in both contexts, targeted and non-targeted, because online branding often leads to offline sales further along the timeline.

Read Heidi’s article. It provides you with 25 great questions to ask concerning:

• Audience
• Format
• Branding
• Social
• Revenues
• Costs

The key to any successful online initiative is first to clearly establish your conversion goals and identify what needs to happen for you to achieve them. Next, as Heidi points out, you need to identify the performance metrics that provide you with the information you need to accurately track your results. By making the necessary adjustments to your campaigns over time based on the right information you can tailor your campaigns to produce the results you desire or discontinue them if need be.

Categories: behavioral targeting, brand management, content targeting, industrial marketing, mobile web marketing, online marketing, Sales, social networking, Technology, Websites
Tags: behavioral targeting, content targeting, internet marketing, online marketing, online media