We approach each of our engagements believing that success can be best achieved by ensuring that online activities are aligned directly with overall business objectives. Furthermore, we believe it is critical to implement a system for measuring and evaluating results in a way that adjustments can made, as necessary, to achieve your goals.
While each situation is at least somewhat unique, the following are some of the guiding principals developed from years of experience that we use to help ensure success:
- Take a comprehensive view of your business. The more that we know about what you do, the better we can identify ways to leverage the Internet to help you achieve your goals.
- Ensure that online initiatives have measurable success criteria and are tied to a business objective. We have found that when thinking in terms of specific business objectives, you are better able to identify those efforts that will bring the greatest return.
- Review existing data to help identify gaps, trends, and opportunities. Often valuable information can be unearthed by looking at data in a new way or by relating data (e.g. across departments) in a manner that hadn’t been done before.
- Determine the key performance indicators that will allow you to more easily and effectively measure the success of your initiatives. This is valuable in that is provide better understanding as to what constitutes success and the determining factors.
- Evaluate the infrastructure in place to track the key performance indicators, and if necessary, identify and help implement improvements. Collecting useful and meaningful data is essential to evaluating any initiative.
- Create methods for capturing and evaluating critical data that provides key insights about your target market and their interactions with your products and services. It is critical to not only be able to collect relevant data but also to have a process to be able to analyze the data in way that you determine actual steps for improvement.
- Establish methods for getting meaningful information to all those in the organization who can benefit from the insights. Sending large reports that no one has the time to read or just lists a bunch of apparently meaningless statistics doesn’t add value. Instead, we focus on how to distribute information that key stakeholders can actually use.
- Continually monitor the digital marketing landscape for opportunities and trends. We believe that part of our job is to be proactive about identifying opportunities for your company to leverage the Internet.
