Advice and Ideas for High Tech Companies Looking to Improve and Measure their Digital Marketing and Advertising Effectiveness

Digital marketing is the most efficient means today for any business-to-business (B-to-B, aka B2B) company to reach their customers and prospects in 2024. It’s affordable, specific, easy to use, trackable, and scalable. But with so many organic and paid tactics available, the task of evaluating where your marketing budget is being spent most wisely, and providing the best ROI, can be daunting.

In a B-to-B vertical we have particular experience in—high tech electronics and industrial products—efficiency reigns supreme. And the great thing about digital advertising is that you can be certain when it’s working through metrics. Using a combination of Google Analytics and Google Data Studio, we create dashboards for all our clients that help us measure these (6) important pieces of data.

1. Measuring Website Traffic

There are a few major sources from which website visitors come:

• Direct Traffic—users typed your URL in the search bar.

• Organic Search—users clicked a link on a search engine result that brought them to your website. Relevant keywords enable your site to be found in a search where users type in what they’re looking for. This is typically what’s referred to when someone s talking about Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO”.

• Paid Search—ads appearing in premium positions on page 1 of important key word searches

• Referrals—users landed on your website from a link clicked on another website where you either paid to appear or appeared through your other content syndication and PR efforts

• Social Media, Organic and Paid Advertising —users first found you on social media, e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, and others via a post you created from content or an ad you placed.

If your goal is to increase your website traffic an overall website traffic report is useful. But it’s even more useful to take an in-depth look at who is coming to the site, where they’re coming from, what pages they’re most interested in, and how long they stay. Tools like Google Analytics help you use these metrics to customize your site to accommodate those most interested in your brand and products.

Track:

• New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors—indicates whether your content is so relevant that your visitors keep returning to see more or whether new visitors are finding you from other sources

• Number of visits your website receives (Sessions)

• How long visitors spend on the site (Average Session Duration)

• Number of pages viewed (Page Views)

• Which pages visitors are viewing (Most Visited Pages)

• Where visitors lost interest (Exit Rate)

• Percentage of people who leave after viewing only one page (Bounce Rate)—due to difficult navigation, irrelevant content, or errors

2. Measuring Conversions

You can drive tons of traffic to a website, send out great emails, and be a social media guru, but if you’re not tracking the rate at which these are converted into sales or leads you are working in the dark.

Track:

• Leads from website request for price and delivery (RFQ) forms—customers/potential customers can request services, more information, or a quote, or schedule appointments by filling in a form. Discover which campaigns result in the most use of various forms.
• Leads from gated content—gating your Tech Briefs and info graphics is a great way to ensure you have top of the funnel activity
• Leads from technical support forms—Next to a request for pricing, a request application engineering support on a topic a prospect fees you have unique expertise is a great way to create a warm lead.

3. Measuring Social Media Success

You can post on social media like crazy but you’re wasting your time and energy if you don’t know how many people you’re reaching: followers, fans, subscribers, connections. Hootsuite® is just one tool to track social media reach.

And just as important is social engagement, meaning clicks, shares, likes, retweets, and comments. At least a 2-5% engagement should be expected from your overall social media reach.

4. Measuring Email Click-Through and Open Rates

• Click-through Rate (CTR) is the number of people who clicked on your message’s link as measured against the total number of emails. Average click-through rate: 2.6%

• Email open rate is the percentage of the total number of subscribers who opened an email campaign. Average open rate: 18.0%

• Click-to-Open-Rate (CTOR) is the percentage of subscribers who clicked something in the email as related to the total number who opened it. Average click-to-open rate: 14.1%

5. Measuring Cost Per Click in Search Engine and Social Media Ad Campaigns

Cost Per Click (CPC) is the actual price paid for each click in your pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign. CPC is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks. Your average CPC is based on your actual cost-per-click (actual CPC), which is the actual amount you’re charged for a click on your ad.

The average cost per click in Google Ads is $1-$2 on the Search Network. The average CPC on the Display Network is under $1. The most expensive keywords in Google and Bing Ads can cost $50 or more per click.

6. Tracking Overall ROI

Last but not least is your return on the investment you’ve made in digital advertising. The revenue to marketing cost ratio represents how much money is generated for every dollar spent in marketing. For example, five dollars in sales for every one dollar spent in marketing yields a 5:1 ratio of revenue to cost. A ratio over 5:1 is considered strong for most businesses.

Don't forget about your brand, content, and growth goals.

While you’re looking to fine tune the things above, there are three other non-analytical components critical to your digital marketing success. These are: branding, goal setting, and creating good content.

Branding

Just like traditional advertising, digital needs a well thought out strategy.

• What’s your company’s mission? What’s special about your product/service?

• Where do you stand with competitors? Look at what they’re doing and saying.

• Who is your primary/secondary audience(s)? Their demographics?

• Is your message consistent across all media? Is it of real human and professional interest to your engineering prospects?

Goals

What does growth look like? How well do you need to convert on leads to get there? Are you really focused on demand generation , email response, and SEO that gets you to the top of page 1?

Once you establish what your goals are, you can work them into your overall strategy to ensure that you achieve them.

Content

Yes. Content truly is King. You must have high-quality content that is relevant to the engineering-driven customers you want to reach. Not hard sell, but helpful, informative content that they will appreciate and that will help them with their system design goals.

Quality, well-written content builds trust, develops relationships, and enhances your brand image.

Add the intelligent use of keywords into your content for SEO and you’ll be on your way to ranking high with both your customers and Google and Bing, and other search engines.

We hope that this blog has been informative. We’d love to talk to you about how digital marketing can be effective for your company.

Here’s a look at what a full-service digital marketing strategy from Strand/Nowspeed might look like:

Search Engine Marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search engine advertising
•  

Social Media:

• Social Media – Organic
• Social Media – Paid Advertising
•  

Content:

• Blog Writing
• Press Release Writing
• Tech Brief / White Paper Writing and Production
•  

Creative :

• Integrated Print and Digital Advertising
• Video
• Tradeshow Booth Design
• Brochures/Catalogs
• eBooks
•  

Web:

• Website Design and Development
• Virtual Tradeshow Booths/Microsites

Media Management:

• Media negotiation/planning/campaign administration
• Re-targeting Campaigns
• Account Based Marketing (ABM)