Data is everywhere. Everything from social media followers, to unique visitors through ppc, or organic visitors generated through SEO. It can be overwhelming, but don't get confused about how marketing analytics relates to ROI. All you need to do is set a clear, short and long-term objectives to surely start the beginning of profit improvement and well planned resource allocation.
Often ROI underperforms due to distractions in the expected performance. The solution? Recognize the distractions and execute differently.
1. Start by Planning
Plan for ROI. Value exists in quantifying the expected outcomes from the marketing activities you are about to enter into. Learn what to measure, when to measure, and how to measure them so that your marketing investments make quantifiable logic. In order to achieve your goals, make sure you establish specific steps to ensure that the processes that you are embarking on has clarity wrapped around the actions you are going to take.
There is a great desire for every campaign to be measured but only very few are able to effectively evaluate the ROI of each channel employed, and only half are using web analytics tools to measure marketing campaign effectively.
Start by creating an initial outline. Look at historical data (if none, don't fret just start) and notice if there are any trends that work parallel with campaigns carried out or outliers that occur when no marketing activity has been carried out. Make sure there is an implementation plan to install analytics into your existing plan. Without it you will have no capability to measure the results of your campaigns effectively.
Once you have both your initial outline and web analytics implementation plan in place you should come to realize that measuring ROI is a lot easier when you have a good plan in place. Preparing this has benefits as it relates to senior management in terms of marketing dollars and gives them a good expectation based on the objectives you have outlined allowing them to identify the anticipated ROI.
Make sure you keep in mind to:
- Align your marketing plans and analytics with financial goals your organization has.
- Use predictive modeling in the analysis of your marketing data.
- Make sure to capture customer engagement data from social feeds to show positive conversions.
2. Don't use vanity measures
Distractions are always nice to have, but you shouldn't tempt yourself with them. Followers, likes and number of shares gives good bragging rights but they do not correlate to conversions or revenues. You should focus on metrics that convert. This in turn equates to ROI. Use metrics like lifetime value, blog shares, cost per acquisition, engagement, and number of active users.
Mentioned before there is a wealth of data available but it is important that you collect the right data. This saves you time and allows you to make better decisions. This helps you to:
- create better customized reports with the data that matters to your company,
- consistently track your customers behavior,
- and analyze the performance of your marketing campaigns with better accuracy.
3. Sales
Your customers aren't like before, customers today are informed buyers. They make purchases based on blogs, reviews and social networks. Good news. Now with the efforts above you should be able to gain a wealth of information on your customers' behaviors. There is a value to knowing that information but your team and senior management can't relate. Why? Simple, because all that data isn't in the form of revenue.
Bring it all back to where we started. Get your team and senior management on the bandwagon. Your marketing campaigns that produce quantifiable ROI should suggest that everyone should focus on how marketing impacts sales not spend that is not measurable in terms of revenue.
Use data to increase sales by:
- Use analytics
- Understanding the journey of the customer
- Creating a ROI discussion throughout the organization not just marketing and sales.
Data is really important to organizations today. Focus on your marketing ROI and don't let pesky technological infrastructure bog you down. Find out how - click here.
