Knowing the return on investment of a given marketing program will help you determine where to invest your marketing budget in the future. Analyzing your results allows you to scale the success of each campaign so that you can adjust your efforts accordingly. You can use these insights to forecast the impact of individual campaigns on revenue growth. Before you can begin to identify the channels and activities you will need to include in your marketing plan, it’s essential to first solidify your foundation, from audience and brand positioning to goals and budget.
The first step in assessing a target ROI is understanding what the goals of a specific marketing campaign or tactic are. And regardless of what the goal is, understanding your ROI will keep you on track for it and ensure the marketing activities are contributing towards the project scope as planned.
Available Strategies to Reach Optimal ROI
Define your audience. Defining your target audience and having a strong understanding of their needs is key to developing your channel strategy. Take the time to build out the ideal customer profile (ICP) that aligns with the pain points your business solves and uses it as a resource to adjust your tactics in the future, as well as their content preferences and the channels they’re most active on so you can align your messaging and channel strategy to best address them.
Position your brand. Once you’ve defined your audience, it’s time to establish the most impactful positioning for your brand. Study your competitors so you can understand where your brand stands in the market and aim to find gaps where your business can provide the most value. Build a strong messaging and call to action (CTA) strategy that can be carried through each of your channels to help set your brand apart at each stage of the funnel.
Set your goals. Setting clear goals that are aligned with the overarching goals of the business will help you know exactly what your team is working toward. With your brand and audience in mind, develop goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound, and be sure to tie all your goals back to ROI.
Align your budget. Establishing a budget to support your marketing plan is essential for seeing success from your integrated program. Keep your audience and goals in mind when building your budget and consider all the brands, channels you will need to use to achieve them. You may also consider using a budgeting tool to get strategic recommendations tailored to your organization’s goals.
Integrate your channels. After solidifying your marketing foundation, next, it’s time to begin selecting the channels you will need to leverage to achieve your revenue goals. With a growing list of channels to take advantage of, an integrated approach is a key to delivering tailored messages to specific customer segments regardless of where they are, giving you the greatest opportunity to increase optimal ROI.
Here are the channels to consider investing in to see the greatest bottom-line impact:
- Brand Channels – Investing in your brand is a great way to build trust and client advocacy.
- Demand Channels – It is essential for lead nurturing through the delivery of tailored messaging to your target audience across channels that can generate buying demand for your product and services.
- EventChannels – Events help build personal relationships that lead to long-term partnerships.
Mastering Attribution and Measurement
Marketing attributions and measurement are the processes of identifying and assigning a value to a combination of events and user actions that contributes to the outcome you desire.
In order to tie the success of your integrated channel efforts back to ROI, it’s important to set up a solid attribution strategy that allows you to track all the touchpoints a prospect has with your brand so you can get a holistic view of how your channels are working together to drive conversions and revenue.
Marketing attribution can be tricky, especially with a multi-channel strategy, and will require constant iteration based on data and results. To achieve success, companies must step back in their journeys toward digital proficiency. Companies must thoughtfully approach their digital marketing strategies in order to create the seamless omnichannel experience customers have come to expect. That entails starting with structured thinking about a digital strategy’s objectives, necessary infrastructure, and measurements.
How to calculate the marketing ROI
The most basic way to calculate the ROI of a marketing campaign is to integrate it into the overall business line calculation. The simple ROI is easy to do, but it is loaded with a pretty big assumption. It assumes that the total month-over-month sales growth is directly attributable to the marketing campaign. For the marketing ROI to have any real meaning, it is vital to have comparisons. Monthly comparisons, particularly the sales from the business line in the months prior to the campaign launching – can help show the impact more clearly. As a result, it becomes:
(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost * 100% = Marketing ROI
Once you have a fairly accurate calculation, the remaining challenge is the time period. Digital marketing is a long-term, multiple-touch process that leads to sales growth over time.
Conclusion
Developing a marketing strategy is not something to be done once and never returned, it means long-term, that needs adjustment all the time. Marketing strategy and plan must work together, otherwise, you’ll waste resources and lose focus of your targets and goals. At SEOmoft we can help you evaluate and impact your performance in the search engines, and determine the right way to invest in your marketing strategy to increase your optimal ROI. This metric is very important in marketing strategy to need to be actionable and provide insights that inform decisions, rather than simply sound good and justify your marketing spend. To ensure you’re investing in tactics that will deliver the best results for your brand, you’ll need to regularly review your efforts across the board.