To establish whether or not your marketing efforts are truly helping the company enhance its bottom line, one of the most crucial aspects of a marketing campaign is to evaluate its performance, effect, and profit. The learnings from the process can be used to inform upcoming data-driven strategies for more informed decision-making. Let’s look at the concept of marketing campaign ROI.
What is a Marketing Campaign ROI?
The process of attributing profit and revenue growth to the effects of marketing initiatives is known as marketing campaign ROI. Organizations can evaluate how marketing initiatives, whether taken as a whole or on a campaign-by-campaign basis, contribute to revenue growth by measuring the return on marketing investment. For ongoing and upcoming campaigns and projects, marketing budget allocation is typically justified by using marketing ROI.
What is a Good Marketing Campaign ROI?
ROI relates to an investment’s profitability, while it can measure various things depending on what a marketer views as the costs and returns. Your investment should ideally result in revenue or sales. However, following up on closed business from your efforts can take weeks, months, or even years if you don’t work in a high-transaction industry.
For this reason, marketing teams must track the ROI of their initiatives in real-time using leading metrics or metrics that act as a proxy for revenue. It is, therefore, a challenge to choose leading metrics relevant to and significant to your business. Typically, these leading metrics serve as key performance indicators (KPIs) or indicators of sales development (KPIs). But depending on your business model, lead KPIs can differ significantly.
Let’s analyze the three primary business models of e-commerce, lead generation, and content using the most commonly used lead and ROI indicators.
Ecommerce Business
- Website traffic, newsletter subscriptions, social media engagement, and things added to the cart are examples of leading KPIs.
- Ecommerce transaction volume, average selling price, and sales income are all examples of ROI measures.
Lead Generation Business
- Website traffic, significant form conversions, webinar and event attendance, and demo completion are examples of leading metrics.
- ROI metrics include: Lead volume, lead quality, lead conversion rate, and closed business.
Content Business
- Website traffic, average session length, average pages per session, and community engagements are key performance indicators (comments, shares, survey completions, etc.).
- Subscriptions (email lists, RSS feeds, app downloads, etc.), and subscription length, are among the ROI measures.
What Are the Ways to Measure Marketing Campaign ROI?
So, how do you measure your ROI for the money you are spending? Here’s what you need to know. Here are some of the ways to measure marketing campaign ROI:
Check the Sources of Your Traffic for Each Campaign
Looking at your website traffic sources (organic, social, sponsored, referral, etc.) for each campaign to determine which is generating the most website visits and qualified leads is one of the most important ways to evaluate ROI. Next, ascertain which sources are bringing in the most clients. Finally, you can use this information to determine which sources have the most significant effects on generating qualified leads and gaining customers.
Conduct Customer Research
The best way to determine and assess the return on investment (ROI) is through thorough customer research. Make your campaigns’ foundational research let you guide your next plan of action. A comprehensive platform that connects your connections with your personality, website, email marketing, and campaigns will allow you to track your efforts. As a result, you’ll be able to see and improve your ROI.
Control and Test Groups
Testing the efficacy of a given marketing initiative against a well-formed control group and comparing the results of the two groups is a beautiful method for determining the true impact of that program. The proper test design can measure almost anything, but it is costly to test everything this way.
This is how it goes. When using test and control groups, you apply the program or treatment you want to evaluate to one element of your target customer group while excluding another segment of that group that is more homogeneous. All other things being equal, you can trace any change in customer behavior between the two groups to the specific program.
Integrate and Automate
Because marketing activities are undertaken early in the customer journey, they don’t always provide apparent returns. However, when integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools, your marketing efforts will generate qualified sales leads and eventually close business. The ultimate goal of calculating marketing campaign ROI is to link web traffic to prospects and prospects to closed transactions. As a result, knowing your leads’ source is essential.
Since we work in digital marketing, everything in our advertising is genuinely recorded. We know the number of leads we receive through search engine optimization (SEO). Through pay-per-click (PPC), we receive Y, while through social media, we receive Z. We track leads into clients, set annual budgets, and allocate funds correctly.
Tips for Improving Marketing ROI
The next step is to apply the lessons learned to future marketing efforts to maximize future performance now that you know the marketing campaign ROI and what a good ROI in marketing is.
Here are some pointers for raising ROI for long-term marketing success:
Establish Costs
To properly construct their marketing ROI assessment techniques and choose which indicators to include in their ROI calculations, marketers can benefit from establishing marketing costs such as creative development, staff, agency fees, and overhead.
Make Specific Goals
In the book What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds by Rex Briggs, the return-on-marketing objective is referred to as “ROMO.” The idea that a campaign can do more than just ROI, such as changing opinions of a brand, is highlighted by this term, which can be used instead of “marketing return on investment” (ROMI).
Conclusion
Knowing how to measure the results can help you maximize your marketing efforts and refine current methods for upcoming campaigns. Regarding results, ROI is the most important indicator for business and sales growth. Increased sales ultimately define your ROI, so if you don’t start to see results after a few months or a longer time frame, it could be time to switch up your approach.
To accurately measure the marketing campaign’s ROI, you must have good marketing automation software for digital marketing for business growth. Set up an appointment with HCL Unica if you want to use marketing automation software to grow your company.