No one can deny the fact that the online marketing world these days is dynamic. In this world, it is easy to get caught up in the allure of vanity metrics. Follower, share and like counts can offer a superficial sense of success. Nevertheless, no one can say whether they translate truly into measurable business results. So, to truly gain insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts online, you will have to look beyond these surface-level engagements and get into the realm of Return on Investment or ROI.
Why is It Important to Measure ROI?
Many factors make measuring the true return on investment from your online marketing campaigns important. Here are a few for your understanding:
- To justify the money, you spend on online marketing
- To secure budgets and gain buy-in from stakeholders.
- For spotting what is working and what is not
- For optimising your strategies
- For effective resource allocation
- To gain valuable insights for future planning
- To make data-driven decisions and
- For improving your marketing performance continuously
How To Get Tangible Results?
You know that getting likes can turn you crazy. However, likes alone cannot tell you the true ROI. You should start delving into tangible results. It should start with defining measurable and clear goals for every campaign. You will have to set particular objectives against simply focusing on more followers. For instance, you can set goals like the following:
- Achieve a specific conversion rate for a particular product
- Generating a particular number of qualified leads
- Increasing website traffic by a particular percentage
When you have these kinds of concrete goals, you can set a benchmark against which you can evaluate your success.
Implement Robust Tracking Mechanisms
Once you define the goals, the next step is to implement robust tracking mechanisms. This involves using analytics platforms like Google Analytics to keep an eye on your website tracking and to track conversions. Also, these platforms will help you understand user behaviour.
If you use social media for your online marketing campaigns, you can use platform-specific analytics tools for tracking lead form completions, website traffic and even offline conversions. Make sure that your tracking is correctly configured to attribute outcomes accurately to particular channels and campaigns.
Calculating Return on Investment
It can be a complex endeavour to calculate the revenue generated. You will have to connect your marketing efforts straight to sales and other desired results. This might involve using unique tracking links, CRM Systems, and collating your marketing automation and UTM parameters. For lead generation campaigns, you will have to track the conversion rate of leads to customers and the mean customer lifetime value to evaluate the long-term return on investment.
The formula to calculate return on investment from your online marketing campaigns is that you should first subtract the value of your marketing investment from the revenue generated. Then, you will have to divide the result by your marketing investment.
To conclude, calculating the real return on investment from your marketing campaigns is important. Only then can you know whether your online marketing efforts are successful or not.
