Look growing your business digitally is an ongoing process that takes time and effort, but most of all execution at all stages. When establishing your strategy you should place your end goal at the forefront of all things. What KPI’s are fundamental to obtaining your end goal? And how to measure and test your KPI’s? Let’s examine each part to gain a further knowledge of a rock-solid digital growth strategy. 

What’s your end goal? 

“Mapping out what your business goals and objectives are is the first step towards creating data that matters.” – 6 General Themes From the Analytics Conference We Can Start Applying Immediately, Loves Data.

When implementing a strategy you need to be precise on what you expect to achieve when setting it into movement. Your aim shouldn’t be vague but deliberate, stuffed with obtainable milestones and timelines. For example 

“By June, we need to produce 15 leads organically a month through our website”.

This is concrete, there isn’t any wiggle room, you know the amount and timeframe, but not the result of execution. 

“By June, we need to produce 15 leads organically a month through our website. This will produce a $15,000 increase in our profit margins.” 

You recognize what you need to accomplish, but you now perceive why you want to achieve it. The question is how do you get these results? 

Developing a Framework to Reach KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)

One word PROCESSES, to optimize your work productivity and reach your goal you need to address it

systematically.

• What tools should I use?
• How are tasks assigned?
• How do we ensure everyone is accountable for their tasks?
• What actions do we need to execute ongoing?

There isn’t one solid answer to these queries, it all depends on how your team operates. Some people prefer face-to-face interaction with breakout sessions. We at Become Digital Today prefer to use tools like Trello and allocate tasks digitally with due dates using comments or messenger programs to convey questions or supplementary knowledge. 

A goal is just an array of smaller goals broken down into KPI’s. For instance, a KPI might sound something like this. 

“Weekly we should produce three original pieces of content that drive X amount of traffic.” 

The process to obtain this KPI may look like this (all names here are hypothetical)

1. Joe will research trending topics 
2. Jack the project manager will prioritize the most significant topics
3. Jack will assign topics to his content writer Mo
4. Jack will set realistic due dates
5. Upon submitting the article Mac will cultivate it  
6. Susie will then schedule and post the articles onto our various channels

Analyzing your Digital Growth Strategy

When a musician creates a song, they sing it tell it’s perfected. When an inventor creates something it’s not done instantly, they constantly test their product through a series of protocols to ensure that it’s the best quality possible. 

The same goes for executing your strategy, you need to test what works and what doesn’t work. Maybe three pieces of content a week isn’t hitting the numbers you thought it would, perhaps you need to generate five. Perhaps Susie would be a better fit at researching topics than Joe or Mo turns out to be a horrible writer and you need to replace him. 

The only way to know this is to put it into practice and steadily refine it. In the digital marketing world, we call this A/B spilt testing; we test different marketing products against each other such as ad campaigns, type of campaigns, colors, and you name it. We do this because it’s the only way to determine what is working best, what needs to change, and where marketing bucks go.  

Use Analytics

Use your analytics software and tools to find these lapses, if your goal is more traffic to your website then google analytics will tell you everything you need to know about what’s happening on your site. 

“Great content marketers are curious. They ask questions, form a hypothesis, test it, and then act on the evidence.”–Andy Crestodina, 3 Content Optimization Questions That Google Analytics Can Answer, 

Content Marketing Institute.

If you’re not getting the numbers you want through social media, look at your data what’s causing these weak numbers? Are you introducing the wrong content to your audience, are you posting at the best times for maximum exposure, are you using the correct platform to share your content? 

All of this information is available readily via your analytics tools. 

Build your rock-solid Digital Growth Strategy

You’ve now established your goals and KPI’s, you know what you want to achieve and by when you want to achieve it. You have implemented your framework and you’re measuring your goals with analytics. Remember to test and test more and remain curious sometimes the best results come from outside the box thinking and are not always clear.