How can you tell if your tactics are working? Certain aspects of online advertising, like brand awareness, don’t offer tangible figures for us to measure.
According to the latest State of Marketing Benchmark Report, 53% of organizations struggle to come up with a concrete ROI figure.
If you have trouble measuring or proving your return on investment (ROI), you aren’t alone. Let’s dive into how you can get a return on investment from online advertising.
What is a return on investment?
Return on investment (ROI) measures the overall effectiveness of an investment, such as an online advertising campaign. It directly ties into how much of the investment was returned, compared to the original cost.
How to get your return on investment from online advertising
By 2021, an estimated 2.1 billion global customers will have internet access. Fortunately, you can take certain steps to ensure you reap the highest ROI as you try to reach them. Keep these tips in mind.
Narrow down your audience
If you don’t narrow down your audience into unique segments, the content you create will be too general for anyone to find interesting. Instead, focus on small segments and create content consumers will love. You want high-quality traffic and leads, not just traffic alone.
Focus on value
What value does your online advertising provide? Don’t worry: You have several options for offering value to your audience—just make sure every post has some kind of trigger.
- Pull at heartstrings
- Inform them about issues
- Make them laugh
- Educate them about what you know
- Help them save money
- Show them how to improve themselves
Focus on email marketing
Email marketing gives you a one-on-one way to communicate with your subscribers. With email, you don’t have to fight with algorithms or search engine rankings.
Plus, you can divide your subscriber list into unique segments based on demographics and interests to provide the most relevant content possible. That’s why email marketing provides some of the best ROI of all digital marketing channels.
With customer journeys, you can focus on building loyal relationships with your leads and customers.
Integrate your online marketing strategy across multiple platforms
Integrating your marketing strategy will ensure that it gets in front of your target audience—no matter which channel they’re using. Campaign Monitor integrates seamlessly with dozens of apps so you can reach your audience on multiple channels.
With customer journeys, you can focus on building loyal relationships with your leads and customers.
How to measure your online advertising ROI
With online marketing, your return involves many factors.
Yes, certain aspects like brand awareness feel almost impossible to measure. However, you can look at a broad range of key metrics to get a comprehensive idea of your overall ROI.
- Number of unique website visitors per week or month
- How your average order value has changed over time
- Your average cost per lead
- Your costs per click
- Domain position in search engines like Google
- Number of new email subscribers each month
- Growth of your social media followers
- Engagement on social media (likes, shares, comments, etc.)
You can check out each platform individually (Google Analytics, Facebook, etc.) and put a chart together each month with your stats.
However, Campaign Monitor offers a broad range of apps to analyze your data through one convenient platform, such as the Google Analytics integration tool.
Does it really matter?
Absolutely. Getting the highest ROI possible is every marketer’s or organization’s main concern. No one wants to spend money on something that isn’t working.
By following best practices, you can work on achieving the highest ROI from the beginning of your efforts. Use integration tools to analyze your data and track your ROI. From there, you can tweak your strategy and adjust your tactics to suit your specific audience and deliver top-notch results.
What now?
Now that you understand how to get your return on investment from online marketing, you can focus on integrating your marketing strategy.
Develop unique audience personas to learn about your customers’ needs and interests. Find out where your audience hangs out online and what type of content they consume. Put effort into creating the most valuable content possible and the ROI will follow.
Do you need help narrowing down your audience? Learn how to create a lookalike audience with Facebook and email to increase your reach.