One of the most important goals of a marketer is to achieve a high return on investment, or ROI. This is a measure of how much value you get from a strategy compared to what you spend on it.
So what elements make a marketing strategy particularly high ROI? And what steps can you take to increase the overall ROI of your marketing campaigns?
Aspects of ROI
Whether you’re printing catalogs, using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, generating content, or practicing something totally different, ROI is always a byproduct of two major groups of variables: how much you spend and how much value you generate from that spending.
How much you spend is the easier calculation of the two. To figure this out, you’ll need to consider how much you’re spending on actual products and services and how much time you spend on the campaign. After all, your time is valuable. If you spend $500 on one campaign and $5,000 on another, but both campaigns see the same nominal results, the $500 campaign will have a much higher ROI.
The value end of the equation is more complicated to calculate. There are some situations that produce very easily measurable variables, such as the number of product sales generated from your marketing strategy alone. But you’ll also need to account for the effects of your marketing strategy on your brand reputation, brand awareness among your target audience, and other less calculable variables.
Still, you should be able to estimate the ROI of a given marketing strategy if you know how much you’re spending on it and how many conversions, visitors, and sales the strategy generates for you.
How to Boost the ROI of a Marketing Strategy
How can you boost the ROI of a given marketing strategy?
- Target a more specific audience. One option is to target a more specific audience. To understand your target audience, you need to stay up to date with marketing strategies, SEO, and social media. You can attend SEO conferences and listen to SEO conference speaker to learn more about online marketing. This has a combination of different positive effects; because you’re targeting a more specific niche, you’ll avoid some of your top competitors, thereby reducing costs and increasing your effectiveness immediately. Additionally, you’ll have the opportunity to perform more market research and create messaging that’s more compelling and persuasive for this segment.
- Optimize for relevance and audience appeal. Understanding this, you should do everything in your power to optimize your marketing campaign for relevance and specific audience appeal. What does your target audience think? What are their beliefs and values? What types of messages are most appealing or interesting to this group? Once you start designing and writing with your target audience in mind, you should see your results multiply.
- Automate what you can. Next, automate anything that you can. Automation is one of the easiest ways to reduce costs in a marketing campaign; it eliminates the need for manual human effort and often reduces your nominal costs as well. Not all marketing and advertising strategies can be easily automated, but some strategies, like email marketing, are perfect candidates for it.
- Optimize for conversions. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of making changes to a landing page, website page, or another piece of content to increase its likelihood of generating conversions. This is a topic that warrants its own article, so we’ll be brief here; making your calls to action (CTAs) more prominent, motivating action with strong verbal cues, improving the attractiveness of your offer, and implying a degree of urgency can all help you here.
- Invest in more traffic. Assuming you’re already producing a good conversion rate, your next goal should be investing in more traffic. For example, if your landing page converts 6 percent of visitors into paying customers, you’d do well to attract as many people as possible to that landing page.
- Experiment and tweak. Using split tests, make tweaks to your advertising and marketing messages and evaluate any changes that occur as a result. If you go through enough rounds of testing, you should figure out exactly which variables can lead you to lower costs and higher effectiveness.
High-Level Optimization for ROI
There are also some high-level strategies you can use to boost the ROI of your marketing practices across multiple channels and strategies:
- Measure and analyze ROI for every tactic. Start by ensuring you can measure and analyze ROI for every tactic in your wheelhouse. If you don’t know how much value a strategy is yielding, or if you don’t know how much it costs, you won’t be able to confidently estimate its ROI, let alone optimize that ROI.
- Cull the lowest-performing tactics. You should scrutinize your marketing strategies closely on a regular basis so you can cull the lowest-performing tactics. Which of your marketing strategies are falling flat? Can you cut spending on them entirely?
- Invest more in the best-performing tactics. Finally, you can look for the highest-ROI, best-performing strategies in your lineup and significantly increase your investment in them (when it makes sense to do so). After all, every dollar you spend on these strategies should lead to multiple dollars of increased revenue generation.
Traditional and digital marketing strategies of all types have one thing in common: they can all yield a positive ROI in the right hands and in the right contexts. The more you learn about marketing ROI and the more you’re willing to optimize your efforts, the better results you’ll see.
Featured Image by PhotoMix from Pixabay