I was having a read of this article below by Rameshwar Thakur - a nice summary of the potential KPIs you can have for a digital marketing strategy.

It got me thinking about the importance of getting these right and ensuring they are aligned with the overall objections of your business.  One particular thing it made me think about was one of the big banks back in the noughties, that launched a campaign on Facebook.  You could tell from what they did that whoever was in charge of Digital Marketing had most likely been given a budget of $1Million and a KPI of getting a couple of hundred thousand Facebook "Likes" - so here's what they did:

They launched a competition saying that whoever "liked" their Facebook page would be entered into a draw to win .... wait for it .... £1Million dollars!

By the time the competition was over they had managed to get 250K Likes - about $4 per like.  Then they did the draw and some guy won the $1 Million dollars.  So the outcome of the whole thing was that they had 249,999 people who still did not really like the bank very much and 1 guy who absolutely loved the bank from the bottom of his heart!

When we work with our own B2B clients with their KPIs we always try and make sure they link them to what is important for their business.  This is where there can often be conflict - between their own KPIs and those overall objectives of their business.  For example, a digital marketing manager might be focussed, because of their KPIs, on getting 5,000 website visits per month.  But if you do not know who these people are and what they do then what does that really mean?  Would they be better getting 50 visitors to their websites but ensure that they are people from their key clients and prospects.  Or focus on lower number of visitors but track those who do visit with marketing automation software to track the behaviour of those visitors and see how many new leads those visitors drive?

If you make sure that your marketing team have KPIs linked to the overall objections of your company then your marketing team can really become a leading asset to your business.