When your website is designed and built with the intention to drive traffic, sell products and convert prospects into leads, it simply misses the mark. These are all short sighted goals and measurement systems; while they are useful in measuring the results of your work as a marketer and they are all valuable health indicators for your website, they should not be the purpose of your site. We are taught as marketers to measure and quantify these things and to determine our contribution based on these raw numbers and when taken too far, they have a tendency to distort what should be your most valuable tool in building brand advocacy for your products or services.
Our job as web marketers should be to defend our brand in the market by building an experience for our prospects and customers that takes them on a journey from discovery through loyalty to brand advocacy. Every experience that our customers have online will have a direct impact on that journey. When our short term goals drive our decision making, the users experience with our brand is shortchanged and we miss the opportunity to improve our longer term relationship with that prospect or client.
Business leaders need to take a hard look at this dilemma and on the measurement systems that are used to judge marketers. If it’s about the leads, they will generate leads…at a cost. Daily, we hear about the next most important measure of success such as CPM, CPC, CPL, CPC and so on, but how do we measure real engagement? Real engagement can and should be measured by repeat visitors and actual site usage as a tool. When your site becomes the online education platform for your industry, this will have a measurable impact on your success. You can, and should measure the depth and breadth of your engagement with your community by how much, how deep and how valuable your users find the tools and content that you produce. When you have a solid community framework, it is easy to measure these factors and to create a scoring system for engagement within your community.
As a marketer, this is how you should judge yourself. How far can you take your prospects and customers on that journey to brand advocacy.
