The fundamental part of marketing is to generate more money than you spend; to deliver a return on investment (ROI). This can be part of a sophisticated, long-term, multi-faceted marketing campaign, or a simple direct marketing campaign. Regardless of the campaign size, conversions are critical and ROI essential.

Digital marketing is no different. Digital campaigns should be focused around delivering a substantial ROI. The only way to achieve this is by having a clear conversion that you can measure on your site, and deliver a CPA (cost per acquisition) lower than the value of the conversion.

This sounds obvious; however 90% of websites fail to achieve this. Instead, generic, simple brochure style websites without sufficient call to actions are the norm. Unsurprisingly when digital campaigns are set-up, that solely drive traffic to these sites, they are unsuccessful. Simply driving targeted traffic to your site and hoping for results is a recipe for disaster. Targeted traffic will not convert if there is no conversion! This applies for both B2C as well as B2B industries.

B2C industries that have E-commerce sites, naturally lend themselves to digital marketing. They have conversions set up, making the campaign targets straight forward. Running a successful Digital marketing campaign for B2C companies offering a service is harder. The goal of these campaigns typically is to generate sales leads online and ideally book meetings electronically. A booking or enquiry form is paramount to measure the success of your campaign. Naturally though, users will not complete these forms unless there is an incentive. Package your service into a simple product that is needed and users will want to complete these forms. I will use the example of an accountancy firm. Their core value is save money in tax so rather than simply driving traffic to a generic accountancy page, offer 30 minutes free tax consultancy advice. This is in essence a sales meeting. Users have to complete the booking form to apply to the offer, therefore entering into the sales pipeline. You will be able to calculate the value of a sales meeting by taking into account the average sales value and the conversion rates of the bookings. This can be refined with time to ensure accuracy.

Conversions can be tracked in all Digital marketing campaigns, allowing the focus to be on conversions and not traffic. With conversion data, you will learn your key demographic and that average visitor numbers per conversion. Working back, you can then put a value on traffic.

At the beginning of a digital marketing campaign, spend time concentrating on conversions, not traffic. Without conversion data, traffic will not have any measurable value and therefore your campaign will be unsuccessful.