When was the last time you measured your marketing ROI? In our opinion, ROI is the most important metric for business owners to track. If you’re not currently measuring and tracking ROI you could be throwing your marketing dollars in the wind. Without analysing ROI, how will you know if your ad spend, your marketing agency fees or the wages you pay your in-house marketing team is money well spent?
As a marketing agency, one of the biggest challenges we face is proving the return-on-investment (ROI) of our work to our clients. With so many moving parts involved in a successful marketing initiative, it can be difficult to tie specific results back to the dollars spent. However, we believe that proving ROI is essential for building trust with our clients and demonstrating the value of our services. And here is how we do it…
We define clear goals and KPIs
Before launching any marketing campaign, it is important that we establish a clear understanding of what success looks like for our clients. This involves setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely) goals and align them with KPI driven marketing objectives that will be used to evaluate our performance. Examples of marketing objectives might include:
- A website traffic target per month
- A specific number of leads generated per month
- A specific rate of conversion
- The number of sales per month
- The average monthly sale value
We track and analyse data
We use a variety of tools to track and analyse data from our client campaigns. This can include web analytics platforms like Google Analytics, advertising platforms such as Meta Ads Manager, marketing automation tools like Hubspot, and CRM systems like Salesforce. By tracking and analysing data, we can see how your marketing efforts are performing against the goals and objectives that have been set and help you make data-driven decisions about how to optimise for better results.
But, there is a disclaimer…
Depending on what software and systems you use, we may not be able to provide a complete analysis of your ROI.
For example, if you’re a brick-and-mortar retail business, we won’t be able to track accurate ROI unless you have a CRM and collect email addresses and other data at the point of sale. If you’re a B2B business and you don’t use call-tracking software, we can only measure the number of form submissions on your website, or meetings booked via an online booking system – not the calls that resulted from campaigns.
Additionally, it’s important for business owners to understand that marketing can only be responsible for success up to a point. There are many other things that contribute to a successful sale, e.g. your product/service-customer fit, your pricing strategy, your existing brand assets, your sales team and process, etc.
At the end of the day, we use whatever tools are at our disposal to measure and determine whatever ROI is possible.
We report regularly to our clients
Because we take proving ROI seriously, we report regularly to our clients, giving them visibility into the performance of their campaigns. We deliver a monthly report that summarises the results of the previous month, provides insights into what is working well and what needs improvement and offers recommendations on ways to optimise.
We also meet monthly to discuss the results from the previous month, confirm priorities for the coming month and discuss the changes required to improve. Through this process, we aim to provide clients with transparency around our service and how we are performing and give them a clear understanding of the results they are getting from their investment.
In conclusion, proving ROI is a critical aspect of any marketing activity and essential for building client trust. By setting clear goals, tracking and analysing data, and reviewing regular reports from your agency, you can feel confident in the value your agency contributes, and be assured that your marketing budget is being well spent.
