What is the KPI for a Digital Marketing Campaign?
One of the most common questions I hear is, “What is the KPI for a digital marketing campaign?” If you are not in this industry, it is hard to measure the performance of a digital marketing agency or executive because the sales of the company may not be within the control of a marketer. For an SME campaign, the most common KPI would be the leads generated from the campaign, not clicks or likes, but leads. The question would be how many leads and how much cost per lead is reasonable.
In our company, we have been collecting data in the Singapore market over the last nine years from literally hundreds of SMEs campaigns. The number of leads varies across industry and seasonality, and we want to make an apple-to-apple comparison as much as possible. We compare the cost per lead (CPL) of your campaign with that of similar businesses in your industry. We determine the benchmark based on the average CPL of several accounts over the last six months. If it is performing below the benchmark, then something is wrong. We have to tweak the offer, the landing page, or the ad angle until we get it right. It is an iterative process of improvement.
The campaigns in the same industry are handled by different specialists, so we remove the human factor in this case and focus on the campaign variables. However, if all the companies in the same industry in our portfolio are not doing well, we might attribute it to a seasonal trend. You can make an enquiry to find out about your industry cost per lead.
What Are Some of the Trends of Digital Marketing We Can Tap On?
Right now, there is a lot of tension in the digital advertising space because the incumbents are being threatened by newcomers. Facebook is trying to fend off TikTok, and ChatGPT is coming up against Google. As small businesses and advertisers, competition among the big media players actually benefits us because the platforms make improvements in order to attract advertisers like us. For example, Google introduced Performance Max, which is one of its biggest innovations for the last 10 years for advertisers. Facebook is integrating WhatsApp and improving its targeting accuracy after the iOS update. Not to mention, there are free ad credits from time to time being offered to new advertisers to come on board to advertise! So, we should grab this opportunity.
Is It Still Worthwhile Doing Digital Marketing Given the Competition?
Digital marketing isn’t like what it was seven years ago with little competition. Back then, anybody could simply put up an ad, slap an image on it, and get good results. Nowadays, this doesn’t work anymore because digital marketing is more mainstream. Five years from now, we might not even call digital marketing “digital marketing”; we might just call it marketing because it is the default way. But it doesn’t mean that Facebook and Google don’t work anymore. Marketing has existed before the internet, and it has always worked throughout time. We just need to go back to the fundamentals.
Interestingly enough, we are going full circle and back to marketing 101, which means finding the business differentiation and clarifying our messaging to stand out from the crowd. This might be considered dry and boring stuff by most people. Sorry to disappoint you, but it is not about the bells and whistles or the super high-tech stuff that can generate results. It is focusing on the marketing part of digital marketing.
This is not just theory. Just by focusing on the fundamentals of marketing, we have helped SMEs achieve 5x ROI, generating hundreds of leads each month and even doubling their business. The best part is that you don’t have to do extensive research to find your USP. With generative AI, it is much more affordable to do it these days.
Should I Outsource My Digital Marketing?
The benefits of engaging a digital marketing agency are that you have the basic technical setup in place. Your basic conversion tracking, split-testing, and retargeting mechanisms are most likely taken care of by the agency.
On the flipside, an agency may not have the necessary knowledge about your industry, which poses a handicap in running the campaign. For example, an agency may not know your competitors’ USPs or your target audiences’ pain points. Without those insights, agencies will have to resort to generic direct ads or discount ads to attract customers and end up with subpar results. Consumers are savvy and can easily detect fluff or BS, especially if the content is written by outsourced foreigners who don’t understand Singapore’s context. We are talking about clichés ad copies like “Are you tired of ABC?” or “We are the best XYZ” and so on.
That’s why, in our agency, we prefer to work in industries that we are familiar with. Over the past nine years, we have tackled beauty, education, home improvement, and healthcare B2C service industries. We supplement our work with market research so that we are not going in blind. If you want to have insights about your industry, check in with us, and we would love to share our findings.
Digital marketing for SMEs can be challenging, but with the right approach and understanding of KPIs, industry trends, and strategic outsourcing, you can achieve remarkable results. If you have more questions or need a consultation, feel free to reach out to us.
