Knowing that you’re getting a return on your marketing investment is vital to the success of your campaigns and ultimately your bottom line.
Marketing costs are mounting continuously – from content production and advertising to traditional print media.
Yet for every pound you put in, if you’re getting more than a pound back, you’re getting a return on that investment and making profit while also making your marketing accountable.
Here are five steps to improving your marketing ROI:
1. Focus on increasing income over decreasing costs
There are two fundamental ways that you can improve your ROI: decrease your costs or increase the income from that investment.
Whilst decreasing your marketing spend might seem the obvious way of improving your ROI, it won’t help your business to grow. Instead, you should focus on how to increase the income from your marketing spend.
Ask yourself which campaigns or channels bring you the most profit and then invest more in your most successful marketing. Once you know something works and it has proven ROI why wouldn’t you invest more money?
2. Monitor the right metrics
Before you choose which metrics to measure, you must have clearly defined business goals.
When you know what matters most to your business, you can determine the metrics and KPIs that help you to achieve those goals – and you can decide what to prioritise in your marketing strategy.
Many businesses look at traffic as a success metric. In most cases however, this is merely a vanity measure. You may bring thousands of visitors to your website but if you don’t convert those visitors into leads, your website isn’t doing its job properly.
Instead consider SMART goals such as growing revenue by £XX, XXX, from a specific product over the next 6 – 12 months. Focus on metrics such as the number of visitors converting to leads, the number of leads becoming customers and the average value per customer.
When you match your marketing investment with strong KPIs and goals everything will fall into place.
3. Test, test, test
Always be testing.
For starters, you should experiment with all marketing channels available to you including:
- your website – many people don’t consider their website a marketing channel but it is often the most important one. It’s where users come to learn more about your business, and if they don’t find what they’re looking for, they won’t stick around long
- email – nurturing both your prospective and existing customers with relevant, helpful email content is a sure-fire way to create delighted customers
- social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Periscope, Tumblr, Snapchat, Vimeo, Reddit… the list and their uses are almost endless. Find out where your customers are hanging out online and make sure you’re there too
- digital advertising – Google, Bing and specific placements on partner websites can all help to raise brand awareness and drive purchases
- direct mail – it may be considered a bit old school but don’t underestimate the power of receiving a great piece of print collateral in the post
To identify your best performing platforms you need to test them! However, don’t spread yourself too thinly across all platforms. Test a couple at a time and see what works.
Don’t stop with testing out your marketing channels. Why not A/B test your content within those channels? Even the smallest change could make all the difference to your conversion rates – and therefore your ROI!
It’s important to make only one change at a time so you can attribute the improvement or decline to that specific change. Why not split test:
- landing page layouts
- subject lines
- CTAs
- colour schemes
- font sizes.
Collecting data on your experiments is the best way to determine which channels and A/B tests are working best. Once you have this information, you can make informed decisions on how to optimise your campaigns and which channels are most cost effective.
4. Get involved with video
Video marketing is nothing new but it is increasingly popular – and for good reason.
HubSpot data confirms that including a video on your landing pages can increase conversion rates by a whopping 80%[1]. How’s that for improving your ROI?
Including video in your emails can also help to improve open rates by an astonishing 200-300%[2]. Why? It helps your emails to stand out from the crowd. Nowadays you can even send personalised video messages via email with just a few clicks.
5. Invest in marketing automation
Marketing automation software is not a golden bullet. It won’t take all the marketing off your hands and miraculously provide you with thousands of new leads overnight.
It takes a lot of legwork to set up. You need to have a clear vision and mission, to know your buyer personas inside out, how to speak to each of them and which marketing channels work best.
Once you have all that pinned down, marketing automation can really enable efficiency and remove the bottlenecks by automating the education process for your leads. It saves staff time, improves user journeys and stops leads from slipping through the net.
Businesses we have helped with marketing automation have seen as much as a 49% increase in leads in just six months!
Focus on the right metrics, the right channels, the right tools and the results of your split tests, and you’ll know whether you’re getting your money’s worth from your marketing campaigns.
The better your marketing ROI becomes, the more confident you’ll feel in investing further in the right kind of marketing.
To learn more about the benefits of marketing automation on your ROI, check out our whitepaper.
[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/create-videos-sharing-every-platform
[2] https://smallbiztrends.com/2016/10/video-marketing-statistics.html
