Return on investment (or ROI) is the most effective tool for measuring the success of your advertising and marketing activities. It has a very simple formula of calculation. You divide the incomes you obtained from a campaign by the amount of money spent on the campaign. If the result is close to 1, you are barely breaking even, that is, you have only just recovered your costs with the revenues. If the result is below 0, you invested more money than you made. And if your result is above 1, you are actually making a profit from your campaigns.
So, how can you make sure that your result is always way above 1? How can you maximise your ROI for online marketing campaigns? And what is the best combination of online marketing strategies which will guarantee that you get the most out of your investment in campaigns?
Here are a few thoughts:
1. Decide What You Are Really After
Marketing is not a game of “hit one score all”. It means that you invest your money depending on what you wish to achieve. If you want a sudden boost in sales, you will probably want to look towards Google AdWords and SEO campaigns. If you want to increase engagement and build a solid relationship with your customers, you invest in social media campaigns.
2. Mobile Is No Longer an Extra Option
A few years ago, marketers planned special campaigns for mobile users. Right now, you cannot build an online marketing campaign without taking into account the fact that a large proportion of your prospects browse the internet from their smartphones.
Promoting your mobile apps is no longer a marketing target. There is no “wow” left in mobile apps, no matter how well designed they are. People’s phones are full of such apps. What you should really aim in your marketing campaign is to convince people to use these apps and convert them into customers. In other words, there is no ROI to be obtained simply from promoting mobile apps.
3. Never Forget about A/B Testing
You should never stop testing and optimising. “Testing and optimising what?”, you may ask. Everything! Landing pages, Facebook ads, video vs. photo ads, email marketing messages – basically everything you do in terms of online marketing. This is the only proven method of maximising your ROI.
In the best of worlds, you always get it right. You have an in-depth knowledge about your potential customers and you target them effectively and efficiently with content marketing and ads which yield a high conversion rate. In the real world, you have to rely on trial and error and do your best to eliminate errors in planning and executing your marketing strategies as soon as possible.
4. Keep Your Eyes on Analytics
This is one of those mottos which you should print and affix on a cork board above your desk. The only way in which you can plan your budget efficiently and get the maximum ROI is to keep a close eye on the metrics, identify the marketing campaigns which are successful and eliminate or optimise the under-performing ones – in other words, continually tweak your marketing strategy.
This is the only way in which you can capitalise on high-performing posts, trends and strategies and get rid of the black holes – those campaigns which suck money from your budget and never give a satisfactory ROI, at least at the point of breaking even.
As you can see, there is no simple and direct way to increase your ROI overnight. You have to continually monitor, plan, reassign and tweak your budget so that every cent you spend is spent efficiently and effectively.