Is Your Digital Marketing Effective? Use an Integrated Scorecard as Your Guide

All companies want to be more successful — whether that means bringing in more revenue, being more efficient, or both. A common thread that's interwoven through all successful sales and marketing operations is careful data tracking and evaluation. It's especially important when assessing digital marketing strategies. This kind of tracking is accomplished most effectively with an integrated scorecard.

What is an integrated scorecard? It's a scoring system that includes data points from all metrics in the buyer's journey, including both traditional marketing data and CRM data that the sales team can see. Simply put, an integrated scorecard is a way to track what's working and what's not on both sides of the aisle: marketing and sales.

How To Set Up an Integrated Scorecard

The highest-performing sales and marketing companies assign specific owners and targets to each section of the integrated scorecard. They also set up target numbers to contextualize each section. For instance, if a student receives 155 points on a test, that's a great score if 175 points is the maximum they could receive. But what if the maximum score is 3000 points? Not so much. In the same way, 155 marketing emails opened may or may not be a good "score," depending on the total amount of emails sent out.

The good news is that with modern automation software and CRMs, it's become much easier to track such specific metrics. Sales and marketing data can now be driven by detailed information about customer interactions at each stage of the buyer's journey, and each stage (and sub-stage) of the sales and marketing funnel can now be assigned to specific team members, who will take ownership of the results.

Where Does the Scorecard Data Come From?

The majority of the data used in an integrated scorecard originates from a few key data points. The most critical sources often include:

• Google Analytics. This tracks all sources to a website and monitors the activities on it. Data from Google Ads can also be found here.
• Google Search Console. This is the most important SEO tool on the planet, and can be organized and streamlined with tools like SEMRush or Moz. It's a go-to source for top-of-funnel data like keyword volumes and website ranking.
• Social media. Each major social media platform offers detailed reporting on user activity.
• Marketing automation and email marketing. Scorecard data can be built on marketing automation workflows and activity in your company's CRM. For ease of tracking, email marketing campaigns should definitely be established in marketing automation software. 
• CRM software (integrated with marketing automation). Key data flowing through the middle and bottom of the funnel (such as sales transactions) will be found at the juncture of marketing automation with your company's CRM.

If you set up your automations to send data directly into your integrated scorecard, with a minimum of manual data entry required, these reporting tools can work wonders for your data collection and tracking. If you're not sure how best to set up that kind of workflow, keep in mind that there are tech tools on the market (like Easy Insights) that can aggregate data from multiple sources and present the information in a single, easy-to-read dashboard. As a result, you can see all your digital marketing metrics in one place. 

The Importance of Well-Monitored Data

Well-monitored (and well-understood) data can supercharge your digital marketing performance, enabling you to make agile, data-driven decisions that improve your results. It can also reveal critical errors that would not be readily apparent otherwise.

For example, imagine that you're running a Google Ads campaign to send traffic to your website. Your marketing team carefully examined search traffic data and competitors' landing pages and collaborated with your sales team to form a keyword-based strategy. Then, the keywords were coordinated across the ads and the landing page to which the ads led. Everything was done "by the book."

By the end of the first week, you see that 150 leads had clicked on your ads, and between 10-15% had clicked through to the Google submission form on your website landing page. So far, so good! But then you notice something odd: When website visitors reached your landing page, they weren't taking the next step and completing the contact form. In fact, not a single visitor submitted the form!

With that data in hand, you decide to dig further... and you discover that the company that created your Google submission form on the website hadn't set up the permissions correctly. In other words, leads were unable to enter any of their information into the form. Once you identify the problem, you quickly take steps to correct it — and your leads start pouring in.

Now, imagine the scenario above without well-monitored data. Would you have suspected a technical issue was the culprit, or would you have simply concluded that your marketing strategy was off-base? How long would it have taken you to identify the real issue? As you can see, careful data tracking and evaluation of digital marketing, made easier by an integrated scorecard, can save a ton of time and money when things go sideways.

Judge Your Digital Marketing Efforts With an Integrated Scorecard

Simply tracking how many leads enter your funnel and how many end up buying isn't enough to judge your digital marketing strategy's overall effectiveness. To make the most of carefully crafted marketing automations and a well-organized CRM, every team must have KPIs in their integrated scorecard — and each KPI must have a readily discernable purpose for being tracked.

Some key questions your KPIs should answer include the following:

• Are marketing tactics bringing people to your website or key landing pages?
• How engaging is your website/landing page?
• How effective is your offer or CTA?

Answering questions like these and making any adjustments that are needed will help you progressively craft a winning sales and marketing strategy that delivers consistent results.
Granted, it may take some work to set up an integrated scorecard for your business, direct the flow of sales and marketing data toward that scorecard, and get all of your team members on board with a new approach. But the rewards of doing so far outweigh the cost — and in the long run, you're virtually guaranteed to see improved sales performance as a result.

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​A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book  Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources.

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