If you’ve ever wondered about the success of your digital marketing campaign and digital marketing efforts entirely, this one is for you.
Time is Money
Busy lawyers and in-house professional service marketing teams wear a lot of hats and are spread quite thin, as a general rule. Time is precious, and in businesses built on hourly billings especially, TIME IS MONEY. It’s imperative to make every second count.
So, how do you determine if you’re spinning your wheels and wasting your time on digital campaigns that don’t work or if you’re investing time and money well into digital marketing strategies that deliver?
Obviously, you have to track digital marketing performance to know how to structure your goals, time, and ultimately dollars.
Think about it. What good is all the effort and initiative placed into your strategies if you don’t look at the results with real data? It’s basically like planning and hosting an event but never turning on the lights to see if your guests are enjoying themselves, or even showed up at all.
Digital marketing metrics track progress and performance in an easily quantifiable way and can (read: should) be the deciding factor in your digital marketing strategy. Of course, metrics vary from one campaign to another, but the bottom line is that you need them, and you’re in luck…
Remember our mentioning just how strapped for time professional service providers and in-house marketers are? We all come from legal, so we feel you! That’s why we’ve made it easy to get a grip on every digital marketing metric you need to quickly assess your score.
We’ve created a Digital Marketing Scorecard for lawyers and other professional service providers (honestly, any business) to accurately and efficiently track the progress or pitfalls of their digital marketing efforts.
Think of it as your golden ticket to getting the answers you need so you can make the most of your marketing budget (and busy schedule).
Let’s look at the 4 digital marketing analytics that are the cornerstone of a winning marketing score!
- Social Media Marketing Metrics
- Digital Marketing Metrics for Website
- Email Marketing Metrics
- Lead to Close Ratio
Social Media Marketing Metrics
One of the primary places of digital outreach professionals should assess when scoring their digital marketing campaign success is social media.
Social media is one of the most popular and profitable ways to build an audience due to its low-cost investment and overwhelming public reach.
There are several important digital marketing metrics to include in your social media scoring assessment, but you first need to set a timeframe to review data. This is what you’ll need to do in every category of scoring so you can get an idea of what’s working and when, using the same period of time across your metrics.
Using the range of one of your recent campaigns is an excellent parameter that will allow you to look at the each digital marketing metric in social media as they exclusively relate to your strategy.
Social Media Metric Measures
- Size of your audience, aka follower count / target audience size
- Total content views, aka impressions
- How many times your audience followed your post to your website or intended landing page, aka clicks (more on that later)
- The collective amount of audience reactions—your likes, shares, comments, etc. across all platforms, aka interactions / engagements
- Total interactions with your social media platform content in relation to the folks who saw your content, aka engagement rate
Break Down by Specific Page
The term social media is a big umbrella that covers quite a few of your social media pages, and new platforms debut every week, or so it seems!
The popularity of the latest and most-trending social media platforms should be of interest to businesses and digital marketers, but keeping up with posting on every single one with the same prevalence and priorities is difficult and actually not very smart.
In assessing the metrics we mentioned across each specific page in your social media platform arsenal, you measure success in an informative way that allows you to know where and when to spend time and effort on social media.
Reviewing channel specific traffic and interaction data regularly can help you assess what content your audience is most likely to engage with and how to get your audience’s attention when marketing your services.
Remember, you’re not the only organization with access to social media – your competitors are also vying for your audience’s attention. Knowing your own score with your own goals will help you understand how to keep your target audience’s attention longer and also how to gauge your own success.
Digital Marketing Metrics for Website
Next, is your website and content. Remember: they call it a homepage for a reason – this is your home, where people get their first impression of you, and the strength (or weakness) of your website and the content within it can be the difference in popping up on search engines or being buried by competitors who have a better grasp of their website’s strengths and deficiencies.
Remember, set a timeline parameter and take a look at the following:
- How does your audience find you? Specifically, what channels are they using to find you? Examples include email, social, organic searches, referrals
- Which pages have the highest amount of traffic (views, unique visitors, etc.)
- When visitors arrive in your website, where do they spend the bulk of their time?
- Which pages perform the worst by producing the highest bounce rate?
- Are viewers returning and if so, to which pages?
- Is your content optimized for search engines and accessible?
- Do you have an internal linking strategy to link content to related content?
- Do you have goals setup in Google Analytics to tell you when you receive sign-ups to your email list and when your audience books a consultation or downloads a white paper?
We talked about your social media traffic, following, and how much (or little) engagement you get on those social media channels, and it’s basically the same concept and application of assessment when it comes to your business’s website traffic.
Typically digital marketing is measured by the traffic they receive. We all know that. While traffic might be viewed by people as purely vanity statistics, website traffic and data are top digital marketing metrics that MUST be included for informed and strategic outreach. This information is also useful to identify web problems you might not realize exist, in addition to providing insight into your target audience’s behavior on your site.
What you really are looking to decode here is your measure of growth over time.
So just exactly what top digital marketing metrics should you include for your website score? Let’s get to it.
Time on Page
Time spent visiting and browsing a webpage should be an important factor when measuring digital content. The time spent on each page is the total time your audience devotes to understanding you, a specific service, or whatever messaging you try to convey with each page published on your website.
While best time of day to post isn’t something we can assess on websites like social media, understanding how long visitors spend on your site and on each page, specifically, helps you score several aspects of each page.
What Time on Page Tells Us
- How effective your messaging is
- How cluttered or clean each page looks (readability)
- Effective or broken links
- If interactive or downloadable resources are working
Driving Traffic to Your Website
Your digital marketing strategy should drive traffic to your webpages, but you already know that. Web traffic is one of the most important metrics for internet marketing. Website traffic indicates if the website has been visited by new or returning visitors.
This covers every page and provides a complete assessment of your website’s performance. You need a quick way to measure your digital marketing performance on website traffic, and the back-end of your site should provide you with those numbers to easily drop into the Digital Marketing Scorecard from By Aries.
New Visitors vs Returning Visitors
Digital marketing success can be scored by analyzing the number of new versus returning website visitors to your site. This metric will tell your firm about the amount of new visitors to your site and the number of previous visitors who return. Whether a person is waiting too long to engage your firm or not much time at all, and you definitely want to capture it.
The differences between new website visitors versus returning website visitors or multiple visits can reveal tip you off to issues such as needing more website info, change in font, graphics success, and even if you should add some lead magnets.
Email Marketing Metrics
Data on the performance of your email marketing initiatives, like social media, can cover quite a bit of ground. Scoring your email marketing can include many areas of assessment, but there are a few key metrics that will give you a solid understanding of performance.
Email Open Rate
How Many Recipients Opened Your Email, AKA Open Rate
Once a beacon of light in the world of digital marketing, open email rates have shifted from being a reliable source of information to a large unreliable source of information. Due to the Apple iOS15 update in 2021, Apple Mail users are now able to opt-out of their data being tracked when they read emails. This means that open rate data has taken a major hit and is no longer a reliable metrics to track, since a large portion of the population owns iPhones and willingly has opted into further privacy protections.
Nevertheless, some marketers still use this metric and data point to help clue them into whether their content is enticing to read. For those who use this metric, ow rates indicate a poorly messaged topic. Remember most recipients decide to open an email based on it’s subject line, so seeing what lands and what your audience passes can help you gauge your email message’s success.
Similarly, for those marketers who still use open rate data as a key metric, a low open rate could mean outdated email addresses and or poor email list segmentation.When is the last time you freshened up your segmented lists? Make sure you’re structuring your segmented lists with strategy and that you are using current email addresses!
Email Bounce Rate
How Many Recipients Did Not Receive Your Email at All, AKA Bounce Rate
Good businesses track the percentage of emails that never make it to their intended target audience. A high bounce rate indicates a change is needed.
Email bounces happen for many reasons. You could need to adjust your subject lines, do more key word research to determine what topics are popular, or you could just be using too many images and special characters that get flagged as spam.
Bounce rates are really low-hanging fruit for adjustment that doesn’t really feel like a failure. For instance, some email platform tools are better than others. Your poorly-performing platform isn’t rally a direct reflection of your talents or content. Easily change that without feeling like you performed poorly, and you can even repurpose that bounced content when you get your platform and sending options straightened up!
Email modifications are easy and lowers that bounce rate quickly!
Email Click Through Rate (CTR)
What Percent of Recipients Clicked the Links in Your Email to End Up On Your Desired Landing Page, AKA Click Through Rate (CTR)
This is a big one, and it’s a metric that also scores how well your content is performing. Take note of the emails you send that get higher CTR, and detail what’s performing well. Boost CTR by creating more of those types of emails. It’s really about testing what works, and a CTR is a good indicator of what is and isn’t cutting it.
Email Unsubscribe Rate
Percentage of Recipients Who Removed Their Email From Your List of Future Emails, AKA Unsubscribe Rate
This one is a no-brainer and hopefully a rate you don’t often see. Unsubscribing happens to the best of us, and sometimes through no fault of our own. Maybe your audience didn’t mean to subscribe in the first place. Maybe their needs changed and they no longer require your service. While we always want to keep leads around to boost those conversion funnel rates, sometimes an unsubscribe is necessary and is in no way a reflection of your content.
Where these unsubscribe numbers matter is when they are happening often or after a specific type of email, especially on heated topics. We know that controversial topics are often part of professional services, and there may be no way of getting around sending comms on those topics, but you can use the unsubscribe rate to determine success on HOW you are messaging those very heated issues.
Analyzing all of this data may feel a bit overwhelming, but once you have a better grasp of the data, you’ll start to identify patterns and missteps to correct for future performance. For example, a low open rate may indicate that your subject lines need work and a low click-through-rate may indicate that your email buttons or call to actions are unclear or confusing.
Analyzing this data together en masse can tell you a lot about not only your email marketing strategies, but also how well you’re nurturing your audience through the stages of the buyer’s journey and help boost numbers on your conversion rate funnel.
Lead to Close Ratio
Measuring your leads generated and how they converted clients is so important to a firm’s overall success and to their marketing strategies.
For example, if your lead-to-close ratio with prospective clients is low, you know you need to boost connections, circle back with prospective clients who may have gone radio silent, or create an entirely new digital marketing campaign to pull in qualified and ready leads.
Close Rates by Industry
Remember how we broke the social media metrics into each individual platform? This is the tactic to further break down numbers for your close rates. If one sector of your practice is pulling in the bulk of new business, it’s probably time to switch up the messaging and devote more energies to the practice groups and industries that aren’t doing as well.
On the other side of that coin is the gauge of what is working. Take a look at individual industry success in converting leads to clients and see if you can mirror their messaging or strategies when pursuing new business in lower-performing sectors of your business.
Why the Scorecard Matters
Having the correct and thorough data helps support sound decisions and can demonstrate to attorneys (who are often far too busy to hear a lengthy presentation on campaign strategy) why you and your marketing department have built certain strategies. They want to see the hard facts, so give it to them.
Once you get a look at these numbers, you’ll never do another email campaign, online outreach, or lead converter the same again. The insight provided by a strong scorecard will make you reexamine everything from how you segment email lists, how many graphics you include in your emails, whether you use emojis in your social media posts, and even the structure of your paragraphs on social platforms and your website (pro tip: readers need white space).
You could use many different online analytics for your business to determine your online marketing campaign success.
A scorecard for your online marketing is a great way to increase productivity for your marketing team, improve efficiency by creating goals that meet their objectives, and ensures that everyone on your team understands your mission and is moving towards success together.
It is always worth knowing how your digital marketing metrics are affecting the success of your business, and now you have a super easy way to make it happen.
Don’t forget to download your Digital Marketing Scorecard, and reach out to your favorite digital marketing gurus to help structure those data-informed strategies to become winners! Likewise, you know that conversion is a priority. CPC and CPA may also attract your attention since the money is being spent to evaluate the success.
