Truth be told, it’s been a very tough few weeks at work. I still do love my job, but there’s no doubt that the last few weeks have been challenging. Now that I’ve been working in my current role for over a year and a half, I am faced with a different set of challenges altogether. One of the biggest frustrations I have is having to constantly defend what I do to my clients – and if you are in marketing, you might know what I am talking about.
What it stems down to I think, is that they don’t really know what online marketing is. And because they don’t know what it is, they don’t know how to properly measure its value and success. All the metrics that we know as marketers do not have the same meaning to them. Business owners know dollars and ROI – and that’s how they will measure the performance of a website. Here are a few of the conversations I often have with my clients:
Page 1 Does Not Necessarily Mean Success
A successful online campaign consists of many different components, one of which is a favourable spot on the search results (yes, on page 1) In the age of content marketing, a spot on page 1 will get you the visits, but it is engaging content on the site will turn the visitor into a lead.
Handoff between Inbound Marketing and Business Development
I believe that my job as an inbound marketer is to generate leads by drawing people in. Once a lead is generated however, it should be up to the business development or sales team to take over and convert that lead into a sale. Seems easy enough, but for many of my clients – this hand off point is blurred.
What is my ROI?
The big question. But how do we define ROI for a website? Is ROI measured by the number of soft leads? Or the number of hard conversions? Who is responsible for pursuing leads and turning them into sales? I think it’s so important for small business owners to figure out the number of leads they require on a monthly basis to ensure ROI is achieved over their marketing spend.
I’m curious to know if other marketing managers experience similar frustrations and even more curious to know how they handled the situation. Because while I believe in what I do, it is equally important to have that buy-in from the clients – how else can you produce engaging content?
One comment