3 Things About Digital Marketing Your Boss Wants To Know

Dan Westmoreland

Marketing is a profession that is mired in confusion, buzzwords, and complexity. It can be hard to know where to start your day as a marketer, what goals to set and ultimately what your purpose in life is (especially if you work for a brand). I’ve always found that in situations like that, it is best to find out what is most important to the person that signs your paycheck. With that said, here are three things your boss want you to know about digital marketing:

1. Inbound is great, but I want customers – If you are all about tracking metrics such as “website visits”, “social likes and shares,” or “MQL’s, SQL’s, Opps, etc…” that’s all well and good, but I will tell you a secret: there are only two metrics your boss really cares about. How many new customers did your digital marketing programs help create and how much REVENUE did those customers bring in?
   
2. Cost per lead>Number of Leads Generated – Phenomenal! You got 500 leads from that trade show when a bunch of untargeted prospects through their business card in a fishbowl to win an iPad. That effort cost you $ 20 per lead and you got one customer out of it. I hope you are sensing the sarcasm. Better would be: you got 250 leads from a webinar demoing your product. That effort cost you $ 10 a lead and you got 8 customers out of it.
   
3. What’s working and What’s Not? – As a marketer, you’re doing SEO, blog, tradeshows, webinars, email campaigns and you have hired a marketing agency to take care of your SEM and PPC, you’ve got everything covered. Your boss does not care how many digital marketing (or offline marketing) programs you are trying your hand at, all he or she cares about is which ones you are executing on. If you aren’t able to tell what’s working and what’s not so you can fine tune or trim the fat – your boss does not give a rip.

Honestly, there are probably more and of course what matters to your boss also depends on who you directly report to. However, I imagine the above are some very solid starting points for you to consider when you start to build your digital marketing plan and goals. The takeaway here is that the goal as a marketer ultimately is to help influence the bottom line for your business by generating new customers through effective digital marketing programs and channels. What are some things your boss cares about as it relates to digital marketing?

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