Five Tips for Marketing ROI

Implementing marketing strategies takes a lot of work. From scoping the work to strategizing, then execution and reporting, even simple marketing plans and campaigns can involve several moving parts and require significant planning.

Given all the work that goes into developing and executing a marketing strategy, it is important to understand whether those efforts have been successful or if they require course corrections. Regardless of the tactics involved, implementing the right tracking mechanism from the start will make every marketing program a winner. Here are five tips for developing a process for measuring your marketing outcomes.

1. Begin with the end in mind

The hallmark of any good marketing plan or campaign is having a clear set of outcomes established right from the start. There are typically three broad marketing goals to be concerned with: finding (lead generation), familiarizing (brand awareness), and following (“fan base” growth). There are many metrics that can be used to track any one of these goals. Deciding which one(s) all come down to the outcomes you are seeking. The important thing to remember is that your metrics must point towards the goal your marketing efforts seek. 

2. Do the math – it’s all about the ROI

Once you determine the outcome you are pursuing, you need to know how much you’re willing to spend to accomplish it. For instance, if your marketing plan is to gain more email subscribers and each email subscriber is a potential customer who could spend an average of $200, then you can calculate how many subscribers are needed to make this a worthwhile investment. The issue here is to know how many or how much is necessary in order to at least cover the cost plus whatever return is acceptable. The days of “making it up in volume” are long gone. 

3. Understand the metrics

Most marketing plans or campaigns are not a simple, straight-line series. They are a complex ecosystem of visual assets, social media posts, emails, landing pages, and paid promotion. Each one of those subsets of the overall program has its own set of unique metrics that must be considered and measured. By considering each component of the overall marketing plan, necessary changes and improvements can be made on the fly. Sometimes making a simple copy change can immediately boost the results. 

4. Pull all the metrics together for the big picture

As we have discussed to this point, each part of the overall marketing program has unique components and along with that, different metrics that determine its performance. Rather than having several different reports for each one, a comprehensive actionable report can be created. There are a few all-in-one marketing automation tools such as HubSpot or SharpSpring that can pull the data together in a single meaningful report. 

5. Keep learning and adapt

The whole point of measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is to make them better! Don’t be quick to pull the plug on a marketing tactic if the results aren’t initially measuring up. By monitoring and understanding the metrics it provides opportunities to make corrections that can have a dramatic effect on the success of the marketing plan. 

The takeaways

The path to successful marketing strategies is not a secret. It takes planning, goal setting, and reporting. If the plan is to improve or accentuate your current marketing plans, then data and metrics should quickly become your best friends. Your marketing strategy should include defining clear expected outcomes, determining the KPI’s you will use to measure along the way, and a comprehensive reporting process that allows you to see the big picture quickly and easily.

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