As marketers, our clients often tell us that they want their website to drive traffic, sell products, and convert prospects into leads. It makes sense, right? After all, that’s become our standard for site success measurement.
But consider this: If you build your site to go far beyond just an Add To Cart click to true brand advocacy, your site will get repeat visitors, you’ll build a more devout customer base, and your site will become a go-to industry tool.
Here’s why: While site traffic and site-based sales are critical to measuring the results of your marketing work and are valuable indicators of the health of your website, they shouldn’t be the purpose of your site. The purpose should be building brand advocacy for your products and services.
Our job as web marketers should be this: 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 your customers have online will have a direct impact on that journey and how they feel about your brand. When your short-term goals drive your decision making, the users experience with your brand is shortchanged and you miss the opportunity to improve your longer-term relationship with that prospect or client.
Business leaders need to shift how they judge marketers and measure their performance. If it’s about the leads, they will generate leads—at a cost. Daily, we hear about the next most important measure of success (think: CPM, CPC, CPL, CPC, and so on), but how do we measure real engagement? It should be measured by repeat visitors and actual site usage as a tool. Because you can 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—and your clients will do the same. It’s not about clicks. It’s about return visitors. It’s about creating tools that are useful and notable industry wide. It’s about taking your prospects and your customers on a journey to brand advocacy.
