To grow an online business you need to get people likely-to-convert on your site. Simple, and you already know as much.

But how do you create a plan for this? By developing a digital marketing portfolio. Like a financial portfolio made up of different assets, your marketing portfolio will be made up of different marketing assets.

This portfolio will consist of all of the online channels you use to guide people to your brand online like social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest as well as online advertising networks like Google Ads and Bing Ads.

The importance of thinking about all of these channels as a portfolio is the flexibility it will give you to shift budget and resources between what is and isn’t working. 

Like a Financial Portfolio

You wouldn’t keep your money invested in an asset that’s falling on the financial market. Nor would you avoid putting more money in an asset that’s yielding great returns.

Further, by dipping your toes in a variety of networks you’ll maximize exposure as well as the chance you’ll find a placement or network that you can consistently and competitively win profitable traffic from. To be competitive online, you need to be where your best customers are.

Like with a balanced financial portfolio, a balanced digital marketing portfolio helps reduce the riskiness of each investment, while also allowing you to get an idea whether an investment is profitable to continue contributing to.

What’s key is having an initial investment that you’re ready to devote to the portfolio and its initial exploratory phase, as well as a consistent contribution plan, to accommodate any growth opportunities within the portfolio. 

This is the key to building wealth in a financial portfolio, and it’s the key to sustaining growth in a marketing portfolio.

Both resources for original content and the upfront costs of direct advertising need to be factored into any growth plan formula, especially in the attention economy. 

Your marketing investment is the first part of this calculation, but your growth (in traffic as well as sales) and profitability are the second and third.

Measuring your Digital Marketing Portfolio at Both the Whole & Individual

Another benefit of a digital marketing portfolio mindset is the totality of it. You can measure what goes in and what comes out at the overall and granular level. With this kind of perspective you’ll be able to facilitate both growth and profitability as you measure the portfolio as a whole as well each individual component.

To begin building your portfolio we’d suggest you include the major networks Google & Facebook/Instagram as defaults. 

These two networks reach virtually all online traffic and are generally the most sophisticated, meaning you’ll be able to find insights on audiences and placements the fastest for your investment. 

Then, if you have any historical customer analysis, look at where your customers are coming from organically, apart from the major networks, and decide if you’d like to increase your presence on those channels.

What matters is that you keep track of how your overall investment is doing. You’ll also want to track how changes to each marketing asset affect the overall portfolio. 

You must maintain this fundamental mindset when reviewing the portfolio or else you might fall into the trap of becoming over reliant on a single channel. 

Single channel strategies can be extremely profitable in the short term, but are not a long term solution for a brand that hopes to be competitive on the internet and not just on a single network.

Finding and Using Key Performance Metrics

Holistic viewpoints exist when performance indicators can be shared across assets. 

To make analysis easy for you and your team, create shared KPIs across your marketing channels.

Whether its leads, leads to sales rates, new customers, your return on ad spend or another metric, make sure that you have this data flowing from each individual channel to a single report or dashboard where you can see everything.

This dashboard illuminates the final benefit of the marketing portfolio we’ll outline: the concentration of data it frames your mind around. 

A portfolio approach tends to reduce the mental fatigue of sifting through all of your assets, a task you should not have to do every time you want to know how your marketing investment is performing.