When it comes to successful marketing strategies and validating our efforts, we all know that metrics are important. The ability to accurately track the impact of a campaign in real time is a huge part of what makes the web one of the most powerful marketing and communication media of all time. When it comes to designing your digital campaign – be it an email marketing initiative, microsite or full-scale corporate website – the abundance of accessible global metrics and benchmark data can be a vital asset for outlining the core strategy. But every demographic is unique in its own right. If you want to really hit a home run, it’s important to refine your strategy to focus on the needs and interests of your specific audience.

There are several techniques that you can employ to create an audience-appropriate strategy that won’t break your budget.

Let’s take email marketing as an example. You’ve got your core message set and you know what you’re trying to convey; you’ve read the Marketing Sherpa studies and you think your subject line is solid. Now that you’ve followed the basic guidelines for passing spam filters and increasing your overall open rate, it’s time to figure out what your audience really wants to read – it’s time for some split, or A/B testing. Take your mailing list and split off a few sample groups (making sure that the sample groups are comprised of similar demographics). Draft up two slightly different versions of your email – use two different versions of your subject, switch out some imagery, and maybe rearrange the hierarchy of the content’s subject matter. Send off one version to each group and start watching the metrics. While this isn’t going to be an exact science with immediate results, you’ll begin to see what works, what doesn’t; what your audience cares about and what they don’t. Over time, through continual refinement, you’re going to greatly boost your success.

The same goes for websites – no matter the size. Plug your site into Google Analytics and use an enterprise class Content Management System (CMS) - like Common Goal WebManager - to ‘react’ to the metrics you see. While this won’t work like the email marketing campaign, where you have two unique versions of a single campaign/mailing, you’ll be able to make refinements based on the user actions that you’re witnessing through analytics. You may very well find that your users are flocking towards a page you didn’t think would be popular. If that’s the case, it may be time to really load the content up with more keywords to help with SEO, and possibly add a new callout to the page on the homepage (and maybe in your now exceedingly popular email newsletter!).

The point here is that your digital marketing campaign strategy shouldn’t stop at the end of the planning/strategy phase, or even at the project launch. It is paramount to the success of your marketing efforts that you constantly refine your approach and continue to give your audience what they want. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the internet age, it’s that people’s attention spans are shrinking. What you planned for last month (which may very well have worked), may be off base today, and may be a total turn off tomorrow.

To this end, we love to check in with our clients at the 3, 6 and 12 month marks to see how their initiatives are going. Making this a priority helps our clients to not only keep up with their audience’s demands, but also directly leads to upward success trends for repeat campaigns (like email marketing) and long life cycles for our clients’ websites and other digital projects. Now THOSE are metrics that your boss or CFO will love!

UPDATE: Read our post on The Power of Google Analytics for some expert tips!