All marketing incurs expenses in some form. Often it’s in terms of money, but even free marketing requires an investment in time and effort. To determine your marketing return on investment (ROI) you need to understand what your goals are. It’s important when setting your marketing goals that you are very specific about what you want to accomplish overall, as well as what you want to accomplish with each individual marketing campaign.
Ensure The Metrics You Measure Match Your Goals
Whatever of your goal, it’s important that you have a corresponding metric that you can measure. For example, if you want to measure whether you have generated leads from a particular campaign, you will have to be able to see where the leads came from, which of your efforts produced the leads, and which did not.
Review Your Numbers Before A New Campaign
Check your metrics before you start a new campaign. You should know how your business is doing before starting a campaign and how well any previous campaigns worked. For example, if you want to get more subscribers and you have a campaign planned to do that, look at where you are right now regarding subscribers so you know your starting point. Look at how many subscribers on average you gained each day, week, or month in the 90 days prior to starting the campaign. This way you will be able to tell how effective the campaign is.
Check Basic Metrics on a Regular Basis
The basic metrics you should always be looking at are: number of unique visitors, bounce rates, click-through rates, and conversions. For social media accounts like Twitter you should monitor retweets and click-throughs, and for Facebook track your reach, likes, shares, click-throughs, and comments. If some of these metrics are stagnant it can indicate the types of changes and marketing campaigns you should be addressing.
Understand Changes in Your Numbers
By tracking metrics even when you are not running campaigns you will be able to spot changes unrelated to campaigns. You may find that a certain type of blog post increases interactions and leads to an increase in subscribers. You may find that an event that spreads as a topic on a social media platform leads to more subscribers. If you are tracking and monitoring all the time you’ll know whether improvements in results are due to specific marketing efforts or come from elsewhere. With this insight you can allocate your efforts to the most effective methods.
Understanding your real return on marketing investment depends on you understanding all the factors that go into each individual campaign. You can only do this by tracking all the relevant factors, including financial costs, the time and effort it takes, and the results you obtain.