Yes, You Can Improve Your Marketing ROI

By Michelle Rebecca

When it comes to making an investment, we all want to get what we pay for. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of marketing. Your return on investment (ROI) is an important metric for helping you to appraise the effectiveness of your campaign and for making changes as they’re needed. Here are some ideas to help you improve both your ROI and your bottom line.

Choose the Right Landing Page

Sending prospective customers to the wrong landing page after they’ve clicked on one of your links is a little bit like letting department store customers off the elevator onto the wrong floor. Don’t make them do any more work than they have to. In other words, it’s about eliminating as many barriers as you possibly can between them and conversion.

When your customers click on a link to get more information about a particular sale or product, make sure they’re taken directly to what they’re looking for. It’s a simple fix to implement, and it can make all the difference in the world.

Understand How Buying Actually Works

We’re all consumers in one way or another, so we’re all familiar with the different stages of the purchasing funnel, which include awareness, comparison (or research) and, eventually, the buying stage. Knowing where your customers are in the process is important for improving your ROI.

What you need to do is understand and leverage the connection between your marketing efforts and the sales process. Part of this process comes down to targeting serious buyers, rather than browsers, by enticing them with keywords that focus on conversion, such as “Buy Now,” “Purchase” or “Place Order.”

Engage in “Social Listening” with Multiple Accounts

There are many possible roads that lead toward creating constructive discussions about your product or brand. On all of them, fans are left with the impression that their favorite companies genuinely value their input and want to create a dialogue with them.

One thing you might consider is setting up multiple social media accounts: one for general marketing, and another that you can use to engage in more personal conversations with customers. Find out what they like, what they don’t like and what they’d change if they had the chance.

Recognize the Important of Budgeting

Budgets can be fluid, most particularly in online marketing campaigns. Your budget should reflect the particular needs and performance of each of your campaigns on an individual basis. Also make sure you’re constantly researching advertising costs across mediums to ensure that you’re putting your money into the right place.

You’ll want to prioritize the more successful campaigns; pumping more cash into ineffective marketing techniques is going to do you no favors. If you’re seeing stale results, consider switching things up. Often businesses get stuck in one medium of advertising without realizing the new avenues that are constantly popping up on the web. Have you been focused solely on SEO for the past three years? Maybe you should try your hand at content marketing.

Know What’s Going On

One thing you can do to help you zero in on an appropriate budget and campaign strategy is to use valuable tools like Google Alerts, Talkwalker, SocialMention, or Topsy to help you identify popular search terms or trending topics. Knowing which brand terms are being used across the web can help you to shape your campaign appropriately.

Make Conversion Easy

There’s a whole branch of marketing science dedicated to uncovering what types of barriers get in the way of customer conversion. Cart abandonment and bounce back are measurable metrics, but what can you do to help ease customers toward conversion?

It could be as simple as making your site easy to navigate. Place calls-to-action on each page in such a way that they can’t be missed but also won’t get in the way. In this way, you can create the sense that the customer is working toward a goal as they navigate your site.

Use A/B Testing to Guide Your Campaign

One of the most important things you can do to improve your ROI is to experiment with different marketing tactics. Doing simple A/B testing with different ad copy or campaign placement can help struggling campaigns find their footing and illuminate areas where you have the opportunity to improve. You may be surprised to find that even small changes like font size and color could have a significant impact on customer engagement.

Know Your Target Market

We saved this one for last, but it may actually be one of the most important things to remember as you craft your online campaigns. Knowing who your audience is will save you from spending a lot of money on poorly placed ads.

There are plenty of studies available that can help you to better understand the types of people who use various websites. For example: knowing who uses Pinterest can help you decide if taking the time to pin your company’s products is going to be a worthy use of your time.

We all travel in different circles, so pinpointing where your customers are going to be is pretty difficult. Focus instead on making an informed guess on where they are likely to be, and you’ll be on your way toward creating a brilliantly targeted campaign.

Hopefully this has helped to demystify ROI, its challenges and what it means for your business. By making just a few simple changes, you’ll rest easier knowing that your money has been well spent.