Digital marketers often have numerous tasks to complete on a daily basis, from updating social media platforms, doing keyword research, sending out email blasts, and the list is endless. If not careful, one could easily end up making hasty decisions that end up costing the brand thousands of dollars. Cases of a careless tweet compromising the reputation of a recognized company have become very common nowadays.
As you do these tasks, it is important to remember that staying busy and working hard is not a measure of productivity. You need to get tangible results from your digital marketing campaigns. Knowing your “Why” will help you get maximum ROI from your digital marketing campaign. The most successful businesses in the world continue to succeed in digital marketing because they understand why they do what they do.
Here are three tips to assist you to know the reason behind your digital marketing campaigns.
Clarity
Digital marketing has evolved over the years. It is now a wide umbrella with many components that you can use to make your campaign more effective in helping you get more sales.
If you are not clear on what you want to achieve, you will not succeed. Most of the brands that lack clarity of the goals and objectives often end up caught up in a spray-and-pray mindset where they just try multiple strategies without thinking of the outcomes.
When you know your “why,” you will have a clear vision of the goals that you want to achieve from every digital campaign that you invest your resource, time, and effort into. Also, you will know which metrics to rely on when evaluating the performance of the campaign.
Efficiency
Unlike a spray-and-pray approach, you will be able to organize and implement digital marketing strategies better. For example, if you are getting most of your customers from YouTube and SEO, but other tactics such as Facebook marketing are not yielded significant results, you will be able to know the number of resources to allocate to each platform.
In this case, it will make more economic sense to allocate more resource to SEO and YouTube. As a result, you will be able to work more efficiently and get the expected results without spending thousands of dollars on tactics that do not work for your business.
Gain Tactical Advantage
Professional Singapore SEO and digital marketers can attest to the fact that for you to be successful in this business realm, you need to be a master tactician. Every step that you take, every strategy that you invest in should be based on accurate data and have a purpose. There should never be wasted motions unless during the initial stages when you are experimenting with different strategies to find one that best works for your business.
7 Tips on How to Get Maximum ROI From Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
Managing a business can be tiresome and time-consuming, however reaping the benefits is highly satisfying, especially when there is exponential growth in return on investment. Similar to other marketing methods, it is crucial to determine your digital marketing campaign’s return on investment.
Implementing digital marketing campaigns is necessary for your business. In the absence of a robust online presence, it is challenging to grow a business. The lack of an effective digital marketing strategy makes it difficult to reap the optimum benefits of your digital campaigns.
ROI is not just a process of checking measurements; it helps digital marketers obtain the most valuable insights about the whole performance and revenue gained from the marketing strategies. There are a variety of metrics that you can use to measure and track your digital marketing ROI. It is crucial to determine which ones are worth measuring and which ones are not.
Here are some reasons why it’s important to measure ROI from your digital marketing campaign:
- Demonstrate value to your potential customers.
- Show the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies.
- Optimize strategies and improve on those that are not working
- Gain control of digital marketing budget requirements.
- Identify, track or measure your digital marketing strategies performance for better results.
Let’s now explore some tips to ensure you gain the most ROI from digital marketing campaigns.
1. Create Valuable Content for Your Audience
With the increased use of digital spaces, consumers are now bombarded with hundreds of promotional content daily; this is the reason why your content needs to stand out by offering value. Content creation forms the basis of your brand’s marketing strategy.
Digital consumers are now intentionally seeking value and personal connections with brands. To achieve this, ensure that your content is well-curated and personalized for the target audience. Once you identify your target audience, it is easy to generate content appropriately; based on their interests, demographics, gender, location, etc.
When content marketing is effective, it drives deeper engagements and interactions with current and prospect audiences, building industry leaders. It, however, demands time, commitment and resources, to gain a return on investments.
The first step is focusing your objectives by aligning them with your brands or business priorities, then ensuring you obtain the desired outcome from your content generation.
What are some of the essential elements of curating, delivery and promoting effective content?
Target Audience Needs
To create a compelling and valuable content marketing strategy:
- Focus more on your target audience’s needs.
- Offer unique insights, data, information, or tips that can solve a specific problem.
- Identify the most effective channels to reach the targeted group.
Also, ensure you segment your content based on your distribution channels, i.e., blogs, social media, newsletters, etc.; this will provide an opportunity to optimize performance through close monitoring on engagements and effecting changes where needed.
Be authentic
While your main goal is to promote your brand through content generation, avoid risking your credibility and authenticity by sharing content that is not reliable. Digital consumers are seeking honest and practical conversations through content. Maintaining a brand’s voice and tone in storytelling proves to be the best strategy to grab your audience’s attention.
Ensure consistency
Content creation requires commitment and authenticity. At the same time, it has to showcase your brand’s unique value proposition. Creating a consistent experience across all brand platforms not only earns your audience’s trust but also essentially reinforces your brand and business market position.
Integrate With Various Platforms
The work does not end at writing a blog post and publishing it online, ensuring you integrate it with various distribution platforms to gain a more significant impact. It is also essential to break down your blog posts into infographics; this way, your target audience will gain the most out of your content.
Test and refine
You can access valuable data and insights with digital marketing as long as you leverage the right tools to monitor your content performance. Tools such as HubSpot and Google analytics allows business and brands to implement, manage and measure all inbound marketing activities in one place. It also provides data and information on all your online campaigns and activities that you can use for future campaigns.
2. Identify Your Digital Marketing Objectives
To gain maximum ROI from your digital campaigns then you need to set clear goals. Effective digital plans should cover different measures that will assist in setting, reviewing, and controlling performance across all digital marketing activities.
Some brands use the SMART goals approach. This strategy helps in planning and in measuring digital activities progress efficiently.
Bad example: Increase ROI from the digital marketing campaign cloths e-shop.
Good example: Increase online sales for women’s clothes by 30% between August to November.
The SMART approach:
- Specific: the objectives are exact to the expectations.
- Measurable: the goal can s measurable against a particular metric.
- Achievable: the objectives should be realistic.
- Relevant: what you are measuring should be essential to your overall marketing objective.
- Time-driven: Ensure you set a deadline for your goals. Therefore, helping you focus on your priorities.
You can also consider setting your marketing goals using the 5Ss; Sell, Speak to your customers, Serve by adding value, Save costs, and Sizzle by extending your brand online.
It is important to remember that your marketing ROI depends on other different factors such as costs, market demand, the industry, and your digital campaign dictates your ROI. Define your motives for marketing strategies distinctly. Setting unrealistic objectives can drastically affect your overall marketing strategy.
3. Get The Right Digital Marketing Tools
In the current digital world, we have hundreds of marketing automation tools to measure your company’s ROI. These tools are essential in determining which of your campaigns are performing well and which ones are not. It is crucial to get the correct type of tools to measure your campaigns.
Examples of such tools and applications include Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Sproutsocial, and much more
Here are a couple of tips that you can consider while measuring your digital marketing ROI.
Evaluate The Cost Per Lead
If your objective is gaining new leads or customers for your company, consider evaluating your expenditure per lead. Facebook and Instagram have an incorporated feature that automatically calculates the cost per lead, which is crucial to determine if you are investing in the right audience.
To determine whether your campaign is successful, divide your advertising expenditure by the total number of leads gained. If the cost per lead is more than closing leads, then that particular campaign was successful.
Consider Your Customer’s Lifetime Value
Repeat and loyal customers are a guaranteed source of return on investment, making it essential to invest in them to deliver value and offer exceptional customer service. To figure out your ROI, consider what an average customer spends on your business throughout their customer lifetime.
Keep Track of Your Conversion Rates
Consider using conversion metrics if your digital marketing objective is to gain more lead conversions and increase sales. Ensure to check which channels convert the best when monitoring and tracking your conversion rates.
It is essential to experiment with different techniques to determine which ones work well for future ads and marketing campaigns.
4. Work On Your Marketing KPIs
The Key Performance Indicators (KPI) metrics are designed to measure the progress of specific objectives, hence influencing what ad campaign is effectively working. Your KPIs need to be very specific as they determine whether your goals are achievable or not. KPIs are applicable across marketing channels such as websites and social media platforms.
Here is how to set marketing KPIs:
- Base your KPIs on a marketing strategy.
- Determine what metrics are essential for your digital strategy.
- Review your data such as website traffic, social media analytics, conversion rates, and Ad performance.
- Match KPIs with actionable activities.
- Set achievable and realistic KPIs.
So, what are the most crucial marketing KPIs you should be tracking as a digital marketer?
Marketing revenue attribution: this determines how much revenue attributes to a digital marketing campaign.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC): explores the total expenditure and overall sale required to acquire a new customer.
Digital marketing ROI: determining your digital marketing RO is crucial in planning and setting budgets. It also helps access monthly and yearly performance.
Customer lifetime value (CLV): determines how much revenue a business can acquire from loyal customers over time.
The Traffic-to-lead ratio looks at website traffic and determines where traffic is coming from regarding organic, direct social media or referrals.
Lead to customer ratio: keeps track of both sales qualified lead conversion rates and sales accepted lead conversion rate.
Landing page conversion rates determine whether your website’s landing pages generate leads and convert them into potential costumes.
Social media traffic: Social media platforms provide excellent avenues for sharing important information and building brand awareness. You can social engagements through metrics to gauge customer conversions, lead conversions and percentage of web traffic gained from social media.
5. Avoid Vanity Metrics
While tracking and measuring digital marketing metrics, avoid typical metrics such as Facebook fans, raw pageviews, and press release shares as they do not directly relate to revenue. These metrics can form a distraction to pursuing your business objectives.
Instead, focus on engagement metrics that have a direct correlation to ROI. Always determine how specific measurements contribute to the growth of the business.
Ensure to collect the correct data saves money and resources and helps make the most appropriate predictions. You make maximum use of your digital marketing tools by;
- Customizing reports with information and data depended on your company’s needs.
- Consistently tracking your customers’ behaviours in regards to how they relate to your business.
- Analyzing marketing campaign data, i.e., before, during, and after the campaign.
Here are four vanity metrics that you need to avoid.
Social media followers
Thousands or even millions of followers on social media may look impressive, but it doesn’t demonstrate how the audience interacts with your content. It’s, therefore, even more effective to inspect an engagement metric that will show how the audience is reacting to your posts.
Determining whether your audiences are existing customers or new ones will help you assess the impact of a particular social platform instead of the follower count.
Instead, measure social shares, as they provide valuable insight on how the levels of your audience engagement with specific content. Sharing also forms a vital indicator of the quality of content and encourages meaningful interactions. In addition, research indicates a correlation between search engine rankings and social signals like shares and the number of likes.
Website traffic
Visitors landing on your pages could mean less if they do not achieve the desired call to action. Thus, as a form of distraction, there is a need to determine your website’s visitor’s behaviours, what led them to your site, and what they probably could be looking to achieve.
Measure instead conversion rates. The first step to success is attracting traffic to your site. It would be best if you then had an effective strategy that will convert visitors into actual customers. High conversion rates are key indicators of a successful digital campaign strategy.
Ensure you conduct A/B testing on your marketing campaigns to understand and improve aspects of the marketing that could not be working.
Pageviews
Page views alone do not provide viable judgment of whether the audience is enjoying your content. Social shares or time on a page can form the basis for guiding your audience’s reaction to your content.
Instead, focus on measuring bounce rates; this indicates whether the visitor on your site enjoyed your content long enough to view or visits other pages on your website. A high bounce rate on specific pages suggests that your content does not align with the marketing methods you are implementing to attract visitors.
Newsletter subscriptions
The number of newsletter subscribers does not present an effective way of gauging the success of a digital marketing campaign since it doesn’t showcase how the audience is interacting or engaging with the content.
Instead, it’s more appropriate and effective to focus on the number of new leads generated for a certain period. Marketers need to ensure content in the newsletter should be optimized by including a clear call to action to guide the audience.
Use the number of new leads as a metric to determine the effectiveness of the content in the newsletter. Also, establish the quality of leads gained will assist in making informed decisions on whether your mode of marketing is obtaining the desired ROI.
6. Leverage Automation Technology
Digital marketers are leveraging automated technology to perform recurring and straightforward tasks to reduce time and resources. Automation tools perform repetitive tasks and help you focus on more complex tasks that demand creativity and effort.
Examples of automated features are AI chatbots to improve customer service operations by answering frequently asked customers.
Automated technology has some benefits such as:
- Improves marketing team accountability.
- Enhances customer retention, thus increased revenue generation.
- Reduce costs on staffing.
- Assists marketers target potential leads across multiple channels.
- Saves on time and resources by managing digital campaigns.
7. Utilize Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics uses machine learning and AI to gain insights from obtained datasets, models, and algorithms to predict future consumer behaviours. Hence, making it an essential tool for measuring and improving digital marketing ROI. With predictive analytics, digital marketers can gain relevant information that digital marketers can be used to improve customer retention and increase conversion rates.
They also assist in planning and formulating effective digital marketing strategies for better results acquired from the value generated by customers and identify the most appropriate platforms they are likely to engage.
AI-powered tools leverage predictive analytics to make predictions on audience preferences. It makes analysis on the visual content likely to work best for your target audience and generates high-quality social media content for you.
With predictive analytics, marketers can:
- Understand consumer behaviours.
Digital marketers can understand consumer interests s from their past interactions. With that information, they can segment audiences according to their interests and demographics. Therefore, making informed decisions on content generation, time schedules, and most appropriate channels for distribution.
- Optimize on resources.
With predictive analysis, digital marketers can focus on their Ads expenditures based on customer value. They help identify and determine the most appropriate marketing channels and areas where to cut on investments.
- Qualify and prioritize leads.
Predictive analytics provides insights based on consumer behaviours, allowing marketers to identify potential audience segments likely to increase conversion rates. The analysis showcases the probability of a consumer purchasing, so marketers can make better decisions on investing their time and resources.
- Retain customers.
Digital marketers can retain loyal customers to understand and consistently improve their products or services based on their consumer needs. Furthermore, the business or brand can predict consumers’
Here are some ROI marketing tools that are worth exploring.
Google Analytics
With Google Analytics, you can get valuable data that can help you draw insights to improve your marketing campaigns. It gives an overview of your search engine optimization and pay-per-click campaigns. Other essential metrics on its dashboard include:
- Bounce rates.
- Visitor’s traffic.
- Pageviews.
- Page value.
- Source of traffic.
- Conversion goals tracking
- Assisted conversion values.
With all these metrics, you can draw meaningful conclusions to determine the ROI of your marketing campaigns.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite helps you manage all your social media accounts on a single platform and track the results of all your social media activities. It presents a complete picture of all your social media campaigns efforts. It saves time and resources and makes it easy to compare results across networks.
Critical metrics for each social post include comments, clicks, video views, video reach, shares. It also helps you see the follower growth rate over time. And also obtain customizable templates to track, monitor, and analyze performance.
With Hootsuite Analytics, you can obtain social team performance metrics, including productivity, response time, and resolution time for assigned posts, mentions, and comments.
To measure ROI across different social media channels, you can leverage Hootsuite’s impact to create graphs and tables that depict the number of leads and sales acquired.
SEMrush
It is the most effective keyword search tool and can gain insights into your organic traffic. It has its Organic Traffic Insight tool, which showcases the number of visitors to your site through search engines. You can obtain details such as
- Number of users.
- Number of sessions.
- Bounce rates.
- Goal compilation.
- Number of pages per session.
Similarly, you can obtain details for each landing page every time a visitor searches from the search engines. With the connected Google Search Console (GSC) account, you can get details of organic traffic gained from keywords.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tracking tool for ROI. It monitors your brand mentions online through social media platforms. It enables you to track data such as:
- Keywords.
- Hashtags.
- Content engagement.
- Brand mentions.
- Influencer mentions.
- Competitor performance.
With BuzzSumo, you gain invaluable insights that can help you improve your overall digital marketing strategy by gaining new content ideas and do competitor research and analysis.
Cyfe
Cyfe is a tool that will help you improve digital marketing ROI across multiple platforms. It allows you to add widgets from channels such as;
- Blogging.
- Email.
- Sales and finance.
- Social media.
- Advertising.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
- Web analytics.
It will assist you to monitor your digital marketing campaign results and ROI across multiple marketing channels. You can manage data on one platform by creating a dashboard.
Final Thoughts
To consistently improve and increase your digital marketing ROI, do consistent experiments and remove distractions. Ensure to set clear objectives for your digital campaigns and KPIs to measure whether the efforts are worth it.
Leverage predictive analytics to generate content that is relevant and informative for your target audience. Ensure to use automation tools to save on time by automating activities and tasks that are repetitive. Finally, avoid vanity metrics and maximize tracking metrics that will help you measure and improve your digital campaign progress.
