Internet Marketing: A Two-Way Street For Success

With less and less time on their hands, business owners are partnering with outside teams to help manage their various marketing efforts.  As a business owner, you want to make sure your annual investment in your outside marketing teams and their respective channels of marketing is providing you with the results you want. Here are a few ways that LSM recommends you measure the success of your Internet marketing team, and how to work with your team to keep costs low and margins high.

Your Internet marketing team should be focused on two goals – making you more money and creating a positive ROI for their retainer each month – but they can’t do this alone. If done correctly Internet marketing should be a team effort and a two way street for success. Let’s breakdown some examples:

Let’s use Google marketing as our case study. You can either pay to have your ads shown on Google for potentially valuable keyword phrases, or you can invest in a company to have your website show up organically on search engine results on searches determined to most likely be performed by your target audience. Your Internet marketing team can get in you right in front of your potential customer and track things like phone calls coming in from their work, the amount of traffic your website receives and where the traffic came from. The two things they can’t do are close leads they bring in for you (except in the case of an e commerce based business) or calculate exactly how much revenue they bring you annually.

Your Internet marketing team will look at the numbers they can control. They may report to you things like an increase in organic search result rankings, the flow of traffic on your website, AdWords traffic, lead form submissions and phone calls. What really matters though? The same thing that matters to all business owners - RESULTS. It is up to you as the business owner to set up clear metrics for measuring your incoming leads.

Start by categorizing your leads and placing them into a CRM system like Salesforce. Be sure that all of your incoming leads are tracked and labeled; what you can measure you can manage. However you receive leads, be sure to have a clearly defined process for categorizing where they came from. Each month you should audit your lead flow and determine which marketing avenues are successful. Knowing this will help you determine ROI and where you can best invest your marketing dollars.

Again – please, don’t keep this information to yourself! Be sure to communicate to your Internet marketing team each month what the exact revenue numbers are from your website and from their other work. If the numbers don’t look exactly as you’d like your team can change their strategy to help make the work more efficient. If it’s a good source of revenue you can expand your investment – if it doesn’t work out then at least you have a better understanding as to what  does and doesn’t work for your business.

All marketing should be focused on finding a return. Measure and communicate your level of return with your Internet marketing team and your Internet Marketing efforts will have a far greater chance for success.

Trevor Emerson

President/CEO Local Search Masters