Informed Clients, Informative Reporting

This is a guest blog post by Martyn Hale, Managing Director, MAK Media Solutions.

It’s often very easy, as internet marketers, to see the overall picture of a marketing campaign – to see how one channel feeds another, or how all channels contribute in some way to a lead or a quote or a sale. But it’s not always so easy for our customers to understand. We sometimes forget this.

Customers have their own businesses to run, and are experts in their own field, but they usually have little time to comprehend the intricacies of their online marketing activities. After all, that’s why they hire us in the first place. But demonstrating clearly to clients how SEO, PPC, Facebook, Twitter, PR, inbound email marketing – and myriad other facets of the digital world – form a an overall image of a company’s internet marketing performance, can work wonders in terms of ‘getting them on board’.

At MAK Media we try to make understanding this as easy as possible. The clear, simple diagram we created for our brochure has proven invaluable in doing this – clients say they are much more confident about investing in our campaigns after digesting it. This, combined with our personal explanations of the processes involved, makes for much calmer, more informed clients.

But this is only the start point. Clients hate to see their money disappear into this mysterious thing called ‘the digital landscape’, without some hard information about where it has gone and what kind of return on investment it achieved. And so, in our experience, high level, detailed reports have always been essential. But working out the ROI on certain activities – particularly social media – has long been a more problematic prospect than, say, SEO or PPC. That’s where Optify has come in.

With more channels than ever before, it’s crucial that we keep track of everything we do. In the past, we had to collate various reports and pieces of data in order to try and form an overall picture, but with Optify, the process has become much more straightforward. In particular, it helps us understand how our social media campaigns are affecting our clients’ bottom lines.

Increasingly, there’s little use in specialising in a single aspect of digital marketing – SEO for instance – because each channel now has the potential to influence and feed other channels. If you write an amazing blog, you need to ensure it gains maximum exposure across all channels. For example, you might use an excerpt of such a blog in an inbound email marketing campaign, in order to drive traffic to your main site. At the same time, you may use Twitter and Facebook to stoke further interest, all carried out in unison. Before Optify, keeping track of such a ‘joined up’ endeavour was tricky at best; now it’s achievable.

Once we have concrete information on where leads are coming from or what factors contributed to their creation, the client and our own team can together make informed decisions about where to focus future efforts or investments. We believe all these joined up activities should offer up something actionable – a pointer as to what the next step is. Today, that’s easier than ever to achieve.

---

I’m not too proud to admit that I’m not a real ‘techie’, but I do understand the science behind the electronic communication revolution and I have the experience, technology and resources to engineer any organisation’s sales and marketing processes – I’m based in central England, UK. I hope you’ll follow my regular blog posts or follow me on Twitter and Facebook.