When you launch a new marketing campaign, you have a goal in mind – to improve brand awareness, increase overall sales, etc. Having specific performance metrics in mind is good, but the most important should be ROI (Return On Investment) tracking.
What is ROI in regard to marketing?
Marketing ROI is simply how a company measures the amount of revenue gained compared to the amount of money spent. This can be used for a specific project, campaign, or a company’s overall marketing mix. With our increasingly technology-driven society, marketing is not just important, but essential for a business to thrive. Furthermore, almost all of these marketing efforts can be clearly measured and are data-driven.
Why is ROI Tracking Important?
There are a few reasons we will cover here as to why tracking your ROI is so important.
- First, it’s in the name! What is your return compared to what you’re investing? ROI tracking will help you provide yourself and company leadership with how these efforts are bringing value to the company.
- Secondly, tracking your marketing ROI will tell you where you should put your money to build the most effective campaign. The data collected from your ROI tracking will show you what areas of your efforts are performing the best. These analytics will help you allocate your budget to get the most out of your investment.
- Finally, ROI tracking helps plan for the future. Many businesses make the mistake of looking at the here and now. ROI tracking provides insight into how your company should develop its future marketing plans. The data can answer the questions that businesses are always asking:
- What platforms does my target market use most?
- What does my consumer base engage with the most?
- Where is most of my business coming from?
How Do I Measure Marketing ROI?
Measuring your marketing ROI is a systematic approach that involves tracking your performance across all platforms. Businesses often make the mistake of aimlessly producing content with no goal in mind, while hoping to get a lot of “likes.” While also assuming that’s going to bring more business through the door.
Another common mistake is not having a clear vision of what success will look like at the end or even monthly as you measure efforts. If you just state you want to increase awareness, that will be hard to measure specifically. Your goals and/or objectives should be SMART (strategic, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound).
ROI tracking begins with a plan:
- Identify a target audience
- Set a goal
- Design your campaign
- Implement it
- MEASURE MARKETING ROI
Virtually all marketing can be measured. Digital efforts (email marketing, website traffic, social media, etc. are the easiest but you can measure sentiment, media exposure, awareness and more with the right tools (and sometimes help).
To learn more about how Pushing the Envelope is taking our award-winning approach of measuring marketing ROI to help businesses grow, contact us! We’d love to hear from you.