What’s your ROI on marketing spend? You’ve built a marketing plan and budget, but is your return on investment for marketing spent generating a high enough return?
Data is REALLY important
It’s incredibly important to collect and review marketing data from any of your marketing vendors, this includes SEO numbers, Facebook, Instagram, Google ads, Amazon PPC, etc. Without reviewing and getting a feel for how these numbers historically trend for your campaigns and products, it will be impossible to make ROI improvements to your marketing campaigns as you won’t have a baseline with which to build on an A/B test.
Download reports weekly and monthly for all marketing platforms you are using and analyzes how the data has trended vs the offers, deals, holidays, etc that have happened. Over time you will get a feel for what is “good “ vs “ poor” when it comes to campaign performance. Larger brands have increasingly intricate and detailed data reporting, analyzing and predictive capabilities to project sales volume, etc.
How do you measure success?
Defining success within your marketing campaigns is important, as, without it, you are blindly running campaigns without knowing if they are successful or not, which will result in a massive waste of money.
Depending on your industry, type of product you sell, how you sell, and company goals your definition of success could be quite different.
For example, a law firm might want you to fill out a contact form or make a phone call to them, and marketing campaigns would be geared towards this goal, while for a B2C eCommerce company, the goal could be to visit an online store page and make a purchase. Other campaigns could have the goals to subscribe to social media channels or be retargeting prior customers.
Thinking through what you want your audience “ to do” should be one of the first steps you take when planning your marketing.
Defined Marketing Processes
Even small businesses should have basic written processes for how to manage their marketing plans, this should overtime be adjusted to be more detailed with notes provided on what works vs what doesn’t, but the end result should be that you or another team member should be able to carry out marketing functions and keep your marketing uniform regardless if someone is out due to illness, etc.
This is important to overall marketing ROI is you need to keep campaigns, consistent if you want to accurately measure A/B testing between ad sets.
Are you A/B Testing?
We’ve mentioned A/B testing a few times, but what is marketing A/B testing? In short A/B testing is creating ads that are very similar other than one aspect, such as the offer, text, style of voiceover, etc, and running them to the same audience to see which performs better. This allows you to refine marketing and make objective decisions based on what ads your audience responds to.
Every digital campaign should have A/B testing implemented, A/B testing can slightly increase the cost of the ads themselves, but the long-term data collected allows you to continually fine-tune campaigns to generate higher ROI.
Video Ads vs Static Ads
There is no refuting that nearly any audience will engage with and pay attention to video ads much better than they will static photo/text ads, and of course this makes sense. Just look at how much more interesting a youtube car review is than looking at a magazine.
How much does video production cost in 2021?
Video ads, depending on the study, increase click-through rates by anywhere from 50-300% – which is dependent on industry and usage. This means that less money is wasted putting ads in front of viewers that won’t pay attention or won’t click on them. While video ads do cost more, the improved efficiency of video ad campaigns results in higher total ROI on the campaign, which is why so many media to large brands are shifting a lot of their digital/email and social media ads to using video.
The above link is a powerful statistic that internet traffic in general in moving towards video, with total internet traffic being around 82% video within a few years.
This means that video ads will quickly become mandatory to stay relevant in digital and social media marketing.
Video ads are also able to be used in numerous channels once created, spreading their cost out over months.
Tailoring video ads to marketing campaigns is powerful too as well, with some videos being designed to spark brand interest and awareness to new potential customers, while others are more specifically aimed converting segments of your audience that are further down your sales funnel, which is achieved using retargeting tools.
Marketing Technology
Does your marketing team have the tools they need to be efficient and effective?
Using marketing automation software, CRMs, email marketing systems, etc can rapidly improve the efficiency of your marketing campaign and boost overall marketing ROI.
It’s impossible to run an accurate marketing campaign using notebook paper and phone calls. You need to have quick access to campaign settings, data analytics, customer groups and be able to share this data between team members seamlessly.
Take a look a the marketing tools you are using, if your systems seem outdated, lack analytics and automation capability, spend an evening looking at more modern competitors. Most marketing software tools are less costly than you would think and can easily save you hours per day.
Sales Team Alignment
There can at times be a divide between the actions your sales team is taking and the marketing plan you are implementing.
Marketing teams should work closely with sales teams to develop synergy on what offers are being run, current promotions, educating team members on sales funnels, and audience segments. Sales team data should also be analyzed by the marketing team as a basis on how to improve campaign performance and get first-hand knowledge of why customers are buying.
It’s also often the sales team can build a personal relationship with customers and it’s through this relationship that repeats business is generated and makes it easy for the sales team to have goals of generating reviews.
Ad Visuals
It’s important that your ads “look good”, while this seems very subjective, we’ve all seen standout ads that look great and others that look awful. If your competitor’s ads look better than yours, then that’s a problem!
Work with your marketing vendors to build great-looking visuals for email, PPC campaigns, etc. This will have a more powerful impact on your marketing ROI than you might think.
Website performance, SEO, visuals, loading time and ease of use is also an important component of marketing ROI. Websites that rank well on google, work great on mobile, and are easy to navigate will convert more clicks than a bad website. Since your likely spending money to get your audience to click and visit your website, you are wasting money if you have a website that doesn’t convert views.
Volan Media is a top Tennessee tradeshow video production firm, having made dozens of trade show videos and trade show 360 vr experiences over the years!
