Return on Investment (ROI): assessing your marketing activity
Measuring the success of your marketing is a vital task.
It identifies your return on investment (ROI), showing you what
works and, crucially, how worthwhile it has been to spend
the money you have. In turn, this helps you develop and refine
your marketing strategy. This guide introduces to:
- Setting objectives
- Measuring success
- Techniques to help measure success
1) Setting objectives
Setting objectives will show you further down the line how
effectively your marketing has met them, giving you the basis of an
ROI metric. Create marketing plans that tie marketing
activities into the company's bottom line. Your marketing plan
should focus on the delivery of results aligned to business goals,
not just on spending. This will help you focus on things that
count to the business. Make sure you account for any extra
processes needed to measure ROI in terms of time and money.
- Your objectives should connect the level of investment to the
achievement of quantitative results
- Don't forget to allocate budget and time to setting up the
processes you'll use to capture data to measure your success
2) Measuring success
What you measure will depend on what you were trying to achieve.
You might measure, for instance, the number of new customers/leads
generated (keeping an eye on any you lose as well), number of new
products bought by existing customers (which helps identify the
most strategically useful clients), brand awareness, market share
or customer satisfaction levels. If you track leads, remember to
track conversion rate to actual orders as well.
- What you measure depends on your objectives
3) Techniques to help measure success
Put sales enquiry forms or allocate a different sales phone
number to each of your advertisements so you can identify where the
enquiry came from. Use web metrics and keep an eye on the most
popular search terms customers use on your site. Online pay per
click advertising gives you an immediate feedback mechanism. Carry
out regular written and verbal client surveys.
- Use sales enquiries forms or different phone numbers
- Make the most of web metrics
- Carry out client service surveys regularly
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