A 5 Step Guide to Measuring Your ROI

How do you measure your online marketing efforts? With so much noise online, it can be hard to figure out what and how to accurately measure your marketing in the digital world. Marketing is not cheap. It can actually be quite expensive, depending on the various marketing avenues you choose to pursue. It’s important that you track all of your marketing efforts, both online and offline, in order to maximize your spend and figure out what is working and what isn’t. The following 5 steps, when implemented from start to finish, will help you figure what ROI you’re getting on all of your marketing efforts.

5 Step Guide to Measure Marketing ROI

1. Set Realistic Marketing Goals. If your marketing goals are not realistic then it’s going to be hard to accurately track the results of your efforts. What do you want to get out of your online marketing? Form submissions? Phone calls? Brand awareness? It’s important to understand your goals so you can set a budget and tactical plan.
2. Develop Your Marketing Budget. Once you have your marketing goals set, you can start developing a budget to make them happen. Your industry, product, competition, and customers all play a vital role in figuring out the overall figure.
3. Implement Your Marketing Plan. Once you have your goals and budget in place, it’s time to implement your marketing plan. Whether that’s through SEO, PPC, radio ads, television ads, social media marketing or another form of advertising is all up to you. Industry Tip: Use a keyword planner tool such as Google Analytics Keyword Planner or a third party application like SEM Rush to help you fine tune and your marketing plan.
4. Track Your Results. The great thing about online marketing is that you can track just about anything using Google Analytics. We highly recommended that you set up Goals within Google Analytics. This will help you track your marketing implementation.
5. Analyze Your Data. Now that you have all of this data, it’s time to see how your marketing did. You can use our SEO ROI calculator, or use this formula to figure out your ROI: (Gross Profit – Marketing Investment)/ (Marketing Investment). So if a company made $1000 in Gross Profit and spent $500 on marketing, then you’d plug your numbers in the formula as so – (1000-500)/(500). In this example, the ROI is 1, meaning that the company made just as much as it spent on marketing. It’s also beneficial to figure out the ROI of each individual marketing effort to see which avenues are working better than others. This can help you decide if social media marketing is working better than email marketing, allowing you to funnel more marketing dollars into the better performing of the two. If you’re not getting a positive ROI on your marketing investment, you will need to research and re-target your marketing plan.

Tags: Digital Marketing