5 Focus Areas for Proving Marketing ROI

Measuring the success and effectiveness of your marketing and advertising campaigns does not require you to reinvent the wheel.  However, with so many online experts offering advice, it can be difficult to know which metrics you need for determining your Return On Investment (ROI).  Focusing on the following five areas will help you make it a little easier to justify your marketing efforts.  These five focus areas can in turn be translated in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  Once you have established KPIs, you and your staff will better be able to understand what works well or not-so-well about your campaigns.  With that improved understanding of your campaigns, these KPIs can then help you correct the campaign’s course before it becomes detrimental to your campaign, products, services, or worse yet, your customers.

Reaching Benchmarks

This is a fairly straightforward metric to measure.  Setting benchmarks to measure the growth and the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising is a fundamental KPI.  For example, are you regularly growing your social media engagement?  Are you seeing routine growth in the number of first-time customers?  Are website landing pages receiving regular traffic?  These are basic benchmarks that nearly any business can use to measure marketing effectiveness.

Analytics Don’t Lie

Google Analytics turn soft perception into hard, reliable measurement data.  The consumption patterns of content offered on your company’s website can be a very reliable indicator of the success or failure of marketing campaigns.  Review your basic metrics.  How many visitors have you had recently?  Is this number increasing, stable or declining?  How much time to visitors spend on-site?  How many pages do they view?  Which files do they download?  Are landing pages converting into actions?  Decision-makers will rely upon the answers to these types of questions as they evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign.

Value Equivalency

Take a look at all of the touchpoints you have researched, considered and ultimately selected for your marketing efforts.  Determine how much each separate medium has cost, the time and investment made, the raw inquiries, and qualified sales leads received from each.  Once the value of each medium has been determined, you can rank them accordingly to determine which touchpoints were the most effective for the time and dollars and invested.  This data is also helpful in selecting which online and offline tools will be in your marketing budget for 2017.

Dig Deep into Data

Digging deep into the customer data that you have hopefully collected over the seasons of selling widgets and whatchamajigs can provide a story.  This story is called predictive analytics.  Using historic data, you can see where patterns of purchasing behavior have been impacted by marketing and advertising efforts.  Once you know these stories and understand how campaigns have influenced purchasing habits, you can act upon that data to refine processes and optimize efforts.  This doesn’t guarantee great results next time, but it will move you in the right direction.

Sales Productivity

You could examine how much and how often people are consuming your company’s marketing touchpoints.  But, a most surefire way to prove the validity of a campaign is by looking at the sales figures.  Are you selling more widgets?  Are more ‘whatchamajigs’ flying off the shelves?  If they are, then the campaigns are working and you are building a solid return on investment.

Either your marketing and advertising efforts are working or they aren’t.  In order to quantify your efforts, it’s imperative that you build KPIs into your marketing roadmap.  This will help to keep you on track.  If you don’t, you might lose track of your original goals.  But, by measuring your marketing Return On Investment, it can help you understand if you hit your target or completely missed the mark before the problem becomes unrecoverable.