This is what great marketers do to get better ROI from their marketing efforts

Good marketers can boost brand awareness while also driving customer sentiments towards the company with their innovative product offerings. But great marketers track customers and ROI.

For any brand to be able to make an impact on the target audience, it is important to analyse the cohorts of their customer base as well as the impact of the campaign on ROI. After all, what marketing manager wouldn’t want to know whether they’re making a good bang with their marketing buck?

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As a marketer, what if you could know that for every 100 rupees invested in digital campaigns, you’re pulling 1000 rupees back? Sounds enticing, right? But tracking the return on investment of your marketing efforts isn’t always easy. However, there is a plethora of tools and software (such as Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, etc.) that let you value each campaign independently. This way, you know what attracts your customers enough to convert the effort into sales. You can also use analytics tools included in social media sites, such as Facebook Page Insights, for an in-depth study of your online impact. With varying level of complexities and good eye for analytics, one should be able to track the customer experience and sync it with future marketing strategies.

In a recent study of “State of Marketing” by Salesforce, an American cloud computing company, it was reported that marketing is no longer about the methods, but money. ROI is the king and there’s no doubt about it. The study is backed by some solid evidences, which states that in the year 2015 alone; more than a third of 4000 marketers polled were able to identify ROIs in social media and mobile marketing. These numbers are quite intriguing and direct towards the changing paradigm of digital marketing.

Why measuring marketing campaigns is hard

What kind of results do you want your campaign to deliver? Perhaps, determining the answer in the very first instance could be difficult for most. Here are some of the key challenges to measurement marketing campaigns:

What to measure: First, you need to determine the metric you're tracking and how you plan to quantify this. What is it that you want your brand to achieve? Do you want to generate leads? Do you want customers to stay on your website for a specific length of time? Online sales and Lead Generation are two of the most commonly used metrics to measure ROI on marketing campaigns. Picking the right model will help you weight in factors influencing the final purchase decision.

When to measure: The money you invest today on a particular campaign will yield results at an uncertain point in the future. For instance, a trunk show launched in the month of February this year may deliver a desirable outcome next month or may be in six months. Taking this into consideration will help you decide how to allot the budget today.

Multiple Touches: As the adage goes, it takes about seven touches in order to convert a cold lead into the final sale. The principle element is to know that it takes multiple touches before the marketer is able to create a sale out of a lead. This measure helps allocate revenues to specific touches.

Extraneous Variables: Needless to say, factors outside the business setting have a significant impact on the outcome of marketing efforts. From macro-economic trends to sales representatives and even the weather, all these and such factors can impact the overall revenue.

High-performing marketers are the ones who put constant efforts into learning across channels and implementing their knowledge to transfer their personalisation efforts into gains. About 54 percent of the marketing efforts these days revolve around creating personalised emails, which are based on predictive analytics. That could well explain why elite marketers are able to successfully integrate their email marketing success into their ROI.

With changing times, customer experience has become imperative, as opposed to the earlier focus on lead-generation activities. Since 2015, marketers have started giving more weight to customer experience, with lead-generation holding the second spot.

Knowing the customers and the ROI of your marketing efforts gives you power over your competitors. It also helps you structure your campaigns in a way that not only caters to business objectives but is also in sync with the interests of your customers. Also, if you’re a marketing manager in a large organisation, it also gives you the confidence to sell the results of your hard work to the company’s stakeholders in a confident way.

So, if you haven’t already started tracking customers and ROI, give it a shot today. Then, use this meaningful data to design improved campaigns that can take you closer to generating substantial sales.