Measuring Marketing ROI in a Digital World
As a marketer, you know that the goal of your work is to bring about some kind of change: for example, getting people to buy something or simply spread an idea. By measuring marketing ROI (return on investment), you can prove the effectiveness of your efforts and ensure that they’re worth doing in the first place. As digital marketers have more tools at their disposal than ever before, it’s also more important than ever for them to be able to show value from those efforts—or risk getting cut from budgets because they’re not performing as expected.
Know your goals
Knowing your goals is the first step to measuring marketing ROI.
Define your goals before you start, and then build your digital strategy around them. Whether you want to increase revenue or grow leads, having clearly defined objectives in mind will help keep you on track as you execute.
It’s important to know what success looks like for each of your key business metrics—and even more important that these are measurable! If there is no way to measure something, then it doesn’t count as a “goal.” For example: “We want our website visitors’ average time on site to increase by 50%” isn’t a solid goal because there’s nothing specific or measurable about it (how exactly do we know when they’ve spent enough time?). But “We want our total revenue from advertising campaigns this quarter at least equal last year’s” has both specificity and measurability built right into it!
Choose the right metrics
As you begin to set your goals, it is important to think about what problem you are trying to solve. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the number of clicks or page views that we forget why we’re doing any of this. It’s easy for marketers and business owners alike to get caught up in the excitement of new tools and features, but it’s important not to lose sight of what our real goals should be.
When thinking about setting your marketing ROI goals, don’t worry about what other people want you to achieve. Don’t expect yourself or your team members to hit unrealistic targets because someone else said so—or even worse, because everyone else is doing it. Instead, identify the problem (why do I need this?) and then come up with a solution that solves that problem effectively without being too complicated or expensive.
For example: if one goal was losing weight after holiday season eating habits led me into some trouble with my pants size this year! The solution here would be something like “I want enough energy during my workouts so I can lose 10 pounds by summertime.”
Track your results
The first step in measuring your marketing ROI is to track the results. You should be able to answer these questions:
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How many leads were generated from a campaign?
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How much revenue was generated from those leads?
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What were the costs associated with generating those leads (advertising, staffing, etc.) and with servicing those customers (infrastructure, customer service hours)?
Many marketing channels drive phone calls and call tracking numbers bring that call data into your marketing dashboard. A call tracking number is a unique phone number you can use to track phone calls back to your marketing channels allow you to better measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Optimize for the future
Optimize for the future. Data can help companies make informed decisions about their strategies, and it can also serve as a tool to monitor progress toward goals.
Take advantage of what you learn from data. The information gathered from an analytics platform will provide insights into where you have been and where you are going, which can help guide future decisions.
Every digital marketer needs to be able to show that their work is having an impact. It’s not enough anymore to just say, “My campaigns drive more traffic.” That’s a expected, everyone does that. The real question that marketers need to answer—and can only answer by measuring ROI—is: Are the results a net positive in terms of business growth?
We hope this article has helped you get your marketing ROI on track and how call tracking fits into your overall marketing strategy.
