Digital Marketing Equations: Mastering the variables that enable success

One simple equation, and a key approach, to focus your team, maximize the ROI of your digital marketing investment, and win online.

My experience is that the majority of businesses, both large and small, have much to improve to maximize their digital marketing investment. You might be doing ok. Could you do better? If you are like many, you likely struggle to grow customers and revenue at the pace desired.

The need to optimize digital marketing is likely not the only issue, there are many candidates that can contribute to a company’s under-performance, from lacking a clear strategy and vision, to hiring, leadership, workforce skills, sales, product, and more.

One thing is for sure, you need to get in front of prospects, make your pitch, influence decision makers, and win. Marketing plays an important role. Think of digital marketing as your 24×7 online tradeshow and a sales force multiplier that never sleeps, and if done well, attracts prospects and moves them toward the goals that you have for our Website and ultimately for your company.

Attract – Engage – Convert: A Simple Model to Focus Your Efforts
There are many similar models to “attract-engage-convert”, though this simple model creates the necessary focus on the key parts of the equation for success. And while these are just three words, what lies underneath each grows in complexity and opportunity as you explore their underpinnings. The three words create a framework for looking at the broad marketing challenge. And if you haven’t noticed, attracting prospects is a challenge.

ATTRACT: You need eyeballs. You need reach, visibility, attention and consideration.

ENGAGE: You need to be interesting, hold attention, satisfy visitor intent, illicit emotion, connect, educate, inspire, and be useful.

CONVERT: You have goals, whether its video views, downloads, newsletter sign-ups, form completions, raw inquiries, followers, MQLs, SQLs, $, or even simple branding to put your offering in the mind of the customer for immediate or longer-term consideration.

A good place to start and a simple way to look at the key levers that you can pull

The chart below presents a simple concept that I first learned way back in my early days from a great thinker named Mike Moran. Many Kudos to you Mike.

Your first equation: % Conversion, the % of visitors that take a desired action.

The two biggest variables or levers to focus on are “Attract” and “Convert”

You have great control over the number of Website visitors that you receive. From organic search or AI response references and direct visits, to links shared from a number of paid and non-paid or earned sources.

What the visitor does on your site, the post-click experience, is a key element that many overlook. A converted visitor is one that takes a desired action on your Website. A highly engagement visitor implies that he visitor finds you interesting. The more interest that you generate the more the person is likely to take the actions that you most desire, what we call conversions.

Conversions can be divided up into micro-conversions or small desired visitor actions, to a larger commitment, and some ultimate conversion like signing up for a newsletter, downloading collateral, or submitting a lead generation or calling your company. Your Website’s engagement rate is a measure of those that take the desired action.

Increasing conversions involves either attracting more visitors, converting more visitors (increasing the visitors that take a desired action), or better yet, both.

%Conversion = (# of conversions / # of visitors) * 100

The % of visitors that are engaged can be a conversion metric itself. You can launch a campaign and measure engagement rate, which in Google Analytics is the % of visitors that either view your site for at least 10 seconds or take an action (scroll or click) on your landing page. This could be the extent of what you classify as a conversion or you could go further.

At the very least, set a metric for engagement rate for every campaign that you run. You might miss the metric terribly but now you have an idea of what to expect and you focus on improvement. You have a “stake in the ground”, now look critically at what the post-click experience was like, here, a tool like “PostHog” can be very insightful.

Engagement Rate = % of visitors that stayed on your Webpage for at least 10 seconds OR scrolled OR clicked on anything.

Perhaps you are happy with a level of engagement and yet you really want the visitor to “click” some special call to action like, subscribe to your newsletter or download an eBook or submit an inquiry form. So come up with a number, take a guess if you don’t have any idea, or look at a few of your previous campaigns and focus on what you might do to improve, set a mark, then learn and repeat.

Be accountable to visitor post-click experience

Many, many things contribute to post-click experience (what happens after a click that sent a visitor to your Website). Will save that discussion for another blog. The key is to set some metrics for conversion, measure how you performed, then learn and strategize on how to move the needle.

In later blogs I will go into many concepts under attract, engage, and convert in detail and share the variables, KPIs, and digital marketing strategies and equations that you can use to measure success.