Measuring Marketing Roi – How to Justify Your Spending

Measuring return on investment (ROI) across several different marketing activities can often prove difficult for marketers. But just because it’s difficult, doesn’t mean it’s impossible! We explore how marketing automation can help you in your quest to demonstrate the best ROI.

It’s the end of the financial year (or nearing the end of one of your marketing campaigns) and you’ve been asked to prepare a full analytical report into how your strategies, or more importantly, how your spending has generated a ROI to help influence any further marketing budgets.

With several different activities running in conjunction, you’re now scrambling together stats from each trying to correlate where and what activity has generated results.

Does this sound familiar?

Well, you’re not alone! According to LinkedIn:

Complex sales cycles typically encompass multiple stages, resources, programmes, and goals. So it’s not surprising that more than…

53 % OF MARKETERS SAID THAT A LACK OF PROCESSES OR TOOLS TO MEASURE SUCCESS PREVENTS THEM FROM USING MARKETING ANALYTICS MORE IN THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS.

Often your key challenge is stitching together each activity or touchpoint to provide a clear picture demonstrating where your financial returns are and showing the value you have provided your organisation.

Google Analytics can provide an overall picture of channel performance with anonymised aggregate data. But how do you link this to your offline data and track leads across your wider sales funnel to measure marketing ROI?

I’d be lying if I said there was a clean-cut, no hassle way to justify spending, however, there are platforms that can help you.

Used in conjunction with multi-channel lead generation, Marketing Automation can act as a tool to align both online and offline channels. It can also extract real-time statistics and measure ROI at different points along the customer journey.

Sounds good, right?

THE POWER OF VISITOR TRACKING AND LEAD SCORING

According to Criminally Prolific, “97 per cent of visitors to your website will leave without filling in a contact form”.

This poses a big problem for marketers trying to calculate the ROI across the entire customer lifetime.

Even if that visitor calls your business instead, the traffic generated by digital marketing channels – like pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO) – are hard to track back to actual conversions.
Marketing Automation identifies those ‘anonymous’ web visitors and discovers what they’re interested in by tracking their visitor journey on your website. It also provides you with real stats, helping you make qualified marketing decisions.

As leads are identified, they are then assigned lead scores based on each prospect’s perceived value. This helps you to determine estimated future revenue growth and the effectiveness of your online and offline activities.

MORE EFFECTIVE REPORTING

Arguably, the hardest part of demonstrating ROI is not just collecting the raw data but presenting it in a way that isn’t going to send your boss to sleep!

Marketing Automation can point you in the right direction when it comes to reporting and comparing the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

Many platforms will formulate real-time, ready-made dashboards and reports which you can generate automatically to present to the wider team.

You can also customise reports based on key themes of interest, priority drivers or interesting analytics. So, whether you’re presenting to one of your clients or your CEO, you can accurately demonstrate where returns have been made and forecast future long-term performance.

MAKING ONLINE & OFFLINE WORK TOGETHER

As customers invest more in multi-channel marketing and diversifying communications across both offline and online channels, getting a unified view of where ROI lies can be difficult.

Tracking platforms like Google Analytics can be useful to track the volume of leads and direct visitor sources. But problems arise when a lead has hit multiple touchpoints across your marketing activity.

For example, a member of your sales team speaks to a prospect at a trade show who then visits your website and enquires about a free demo. Typically, this enquiry would be displayed as a completely new lead – which it isn’t!

Marketing automation helps you to view the end-to-end picture of the customer journey, from the first interaction to conversion and beyond. Whether your marketing strategies encompass email marketing, telemarketing, events, and social media, you can still track your lead journey and campaign effectiveness.

So how about using Marketing Automation in your own business as a tool for measuring internal rate of return? If you would like to find out more about the Marketing Automation services we offer, please fill out our contact form and we’ll be in touch.