ROI or return on investment is a key metric for all business owners and should be applied to all marketing activities.
With so much of what we do from a marketing perspective being focused on our digital audiences it’s vitally important to the health of your business that you have tracking and measuring procedures in place. When it comes to digital marketing, it is important to test your written and visual content to ensure it is successful.
The duration of digital marketing campaigns and tactics change more rapidly than traditional methods so if you use content marketing as part of your strategy, the tools below will help measure the success or failure of each campaign—or piece of content.
First step is to;
SET A GOAL FOR YOUR CAMPAIGN
Naturally, some of your content should be designed towards creating conversions and some will be designed for creating an increased level of brand awareness. It’s because of this that you should first identify what key factors of measurement are most valuable to you.
It is challenging to measure the number of conversions a social media post that generates 2,000 “likes” and 300 “shares” is however you can measure your ROI when it comes to customer engagement.
Some of the more common things to consider when measuring your marketing activities are:
- Brand Awareness
- Lead Generation
- Customer Acquisition
- Engagement
- Customer Retention/Loyalty
- Website Traffic
- Lead Management
- Repeat Clients and/or Website Visitors
It’s important to keep in mind that content needs to have a measurable ROI—however each piece of content should be measured by more than one of the factors listed above.
When measuring the social media example provided above, you can use Engagement, Brand Awareness, and Thought Leadership as key performance indicators.
Here are some specific tools you can utilize to gauge your ROI.
WEBSITE ANALYTICS
Regardless of whether you own a simple blog, or had a website built for you— make sure you have access to your properties analytics making sure you pay close attention to:
- What is the variance in traffic from week to week, month to month, and year to year?
- What days generate the most traffic?
- What time of the day generates more traffic?
- What country do your visitors come from?
- How many new v’s repeat visitors do you have?
- What is the percentage breakdown of mobile v’s desktop traffic?
- What are your most popular pages?
- What are your least popular pages?
- What is the average time spent per page and/or per session?
SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS
Facebook, Linkedin & Twitter most social media platform will provide you with an analytics package for your business page/account. Because you may not be able to gauge the number of leads, or sales that you generate from social media—you can measure other factors like;
- Weekly traffic
- Most popular posts
- How many new friends, followers, or connections you generate
- How many likes, shares, and comments you generate
PAGE RANK
As traffic to your website increases your page ranks on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing should too. Keep an eye on your overall website rank, along with individual web pages, blog posts, or other content.
ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS
Cross-platform marketing forms a major part of a small businesses marketing activities.
For example, if someone hears an ad for your business on the radio—then call you on the phone. Or someone could receive a direct mailer, which prompts them to email you.
With today’s numerous communication methods, it’s important to ask your customers where they heard about you so you can log and record them.
REFERRALS
NEVER underestimate the power of referrals! Make your content and information about your business easy to share electronically. This is as simple as providing your phone number, email address, and “click to share” buttons to your online content.
THE BOTTOM LINE
If your sales are on the rise, this means that hopefully whatever it is you are doing is working. Try and identify what it is that’s working right now so you can continue to improve and use more of your time and energy into trying new methods and tactics.
OVERALL ROI
Once you’ve figured out what performance measurements you are going to use, take a look at your ROI as a whole. Google recommends that your traffic to your site should look something like this;
- Search Traffic 40 – 50%
- Referral Traffic 20%
- Direct Traffic 20%
- Online Marketing Campaigns 10%
Good luck and as always, if you need some help determining what KPI’s or measurement tactics you should be using, please give us a call.
0 Comments