Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Conversions: Visits to lead to customers.
Maybe I’m just stubborn (which would be true), but I cannot wrap my mind around any marketing plan that does not take conversions into account at nearly every stage of the process: budgeting, optimizing, and measuring a campaign’s success. If I see a proposal that doesn’t track conversions, I don’t even bother reading further. The point is simple: if you don’t have a metric with which to measure the success of your marketing campaigns, then how do you know if they really working?
Really working is the important part: does this marketing plan make your business more money? If you are focussing only on a PR push to try and (just for random example) convince the public that fracking doesn’t cause your water to catch fire, and that it’s actually OK to have to open the windows while showering so that your house won’t explode… then OK. That’s PR, but that’s not what I’m addressing. I mean marketing to the end of generating business.
And if you don’t track marketing conversions, you cannot optimize any of your campaigns at any stage. Why in the world would you NOT want to be able to have data that empowers you to improve your marketing campaigns? Bad tracking just seems crazy to me.
In that sales funnel image above, there are two places in the funnel where you can track conversions: visit to lead, and lead to customer. You want to do both. The former helps you improve targeting visitors as well as methods of how you’re encouraging lead capture. The latter helps your sales team learn which techniques work and which do not when it comes to converting leads to paying customers.
OK, yes… data can be boring… but it can save and make you more money. It is “work” after all.
So… why does this matter? Design your marketing campaigns in a way that makes it possible to track conversions. As many as possible, anyway. If it’s possible for a marketing channel, then do it so you can optimize and improve to get the best ROI.
Honestly… why would you NOT want better results from your marketing?
