One of the most important metrics to measure in your marketing department is return on investment, or ROI. Your overall ROI approximates how much value you’re getting with respect to how much you spend on marketing and advertising.
What are the best strategies to keep increasing that ROI figure? And how do you implement them?
The High-Level Vision
Ultimately, ROI is the best metric to optimize for in the context of marketing. That’s because it approximates not only the value of the results you’re generating from your marketing campaigns, but also how much you’re spending to achieve those results. As a result, ROI helps you understand the true net value of your efforts.
Boosting your marketing ROI is a way to make sure you get more value out of every dollar and minute you invest in your marketing strategy. The two straightforward ways to do it are to reduce your expense basis and increase the returns you get from your marketing investments.
However, within these categories, things get significantly more complicated. That’s one reason why companies sometimes hire interim CMOs, or fractional CMOs. These experienced, knowledgeable marketing candidates can step in as a temporary CMO or a supplementary CMO to analyze your current efforts, brainstorm new strategies, and help you put together systems that can award you a much higher ROI. In their absence, you can conduct these analyses and make these decisions on your own – but you may not be able to see the same level of results.
Cutting Costs
In the realm of cutting costs, you need to be careful not to sacrifice results. Still, there are several strategies that can help you:
– Eliminate waste. For starters, you can look for and eliminate areas of waste. Waste can cover a broad spectrum, and it’s not always easy to identify. Put succinctly, if you’re spending money on something that isn’t generating a positive return, you should cease spending money on it. Strategies with minimal positive returns should also warrant further inspection.
– Scale back ineffective or inefficient campaigns. Pay attention to campaigns and strategies that seem to be ineffective or inefficient. These may pale in comparison to your stronger strategies or may occupy a niche you don’t truly need to accomplish your goals. At the same time, you may not feel comfortable cutting them as a form of waste. Instead, consider scaling back your investments to reduce your cost basis.
– Prioritize free and inexpensive channels. When adding new strategies and tactics to your marketing mix, prioritize free and inexpensive channels. Posting organically on social media, for example, costs you nothing, yet could get you millions of impressions if you’re both talented and lucky.
– Expand your workforce wisely. Labor is going to be your biggest business expense. Accordingly, you should expand your workforce wisely. Investing too much money in people you don’t truly need can overburden your marketing department with unnecessary expenses.
Increasing Returns
You can also look at the other end of the equation, optimizing your efforts to increase your total marketing returns:
- – Increase relevance and specific appeal. You’ll typically see better marketing results if you focus on highly niche, specific target audiences. Narrow the scope of your focus and make sure your messages are as relevant as possible.
- – Competitively differentiate. Work hard to differentiate your brand from other brands. If you can stand apart in this sector, you’ll have an easier time making your marketing messages visible and you’ll have fewer competitive threats to worry about. Think about what makes your brand totally unique; what is the signature value that you can provide in this market? And how can you present that idea to your audience in an effective way?
- – Introduce novelty. Novel strategies tend to be more rewarding than their familiar counterparts, especially in the long run. Your customers and prospects don’t want to see regurgitated messages they’ve seen millions of times in the past. Just keep in mind that not every novel idea is going to work out, and you’ll need to experiment to keep increasing returns here.
- – Double down on your best strategies. Analyze your efforts to discover your best strategies and double down on them. Chances are, you have at least one platform or approach in your arsenal that has provided an exemplary return. Investing more in this strategy or expanding your efforts in it can yield incredible results.
- – Collaborate with other departments. Make sure your marketing department collaborates closely with other departments, tapping into their knowledge, resources, and support to see better results for the entire business.
There are countless ways to become a better marketer, so these strategies merely represent some of the lowest-hanging fruit. Keep experimenting and reallocating your investments until you have a better idea of what’s going to give you the greatest return on your investment.