Does Your CEO and Marketing Team Know What Your Marketing ROI Is?

On the next $1,000 you spend on marketing, do you (or your boss) know how much revenue you’re going to get?

Even better, do you know how much profit you’re going to make?

No?

At least you’re in good company; it seems like most don’t know, and I would argue that the lack of a solid number is the greatest self-imposed limit to your company’s growth.

Here’s my logic:

Q: If you knew you made a profit of more than $1,000 for every $1,000 you spent on marketing in the short term (not including the long-term results), how much would you want to spend on marketing?

A: An infinite amount. At least I’d hope so.

If there was a magic machine that you could put money into and get back significantly more money, you’d be ecstatic. But what if you don’t know you have that machine?

To stretch the analogy a little further, what if you had a bunch of unlabeled machines, with some of them of the profit-making variety we just discussed, while some of them simply ate your money? You’d be much less likely to use any of them. This is where most company’s marketing campaigns reside. Not tracking, or at least estimating, the results of individual marketing campaigns is a company-killer.

You’d be surprised what kind of things can be accurately tracked, and tied back to real dollars.

One example: We place printed magazine advertisements with dozens of magazines, and our clients can see how many calls each magazine ad generated. More than that, though, we can track which of those calls resulted in sales on the phone, tallying up how many times certain words or phrases were used within the call.

Another phone example: Each visitor to our i7 Marketing website is shown a different phone number than every other visitor who’s using the website right now. We can associate each call with prior and future interactions with our website (pages you visited, even the keyword you searched to find our site in many cases). That allows us to know how many leads every effort produces, produce better content, and focus our strategies on the things that really matter.

Already convinced that this is valuable? Give us a call at 844-777-7794 to discuss how we can revolutionize your marketing campaigns.

On the web side of things, we use specially-generated links on social media posts, in email campaigns, and more to let us see potential customer interaction much more granularly than would normally be possible. Not only can we tell which email in a series the customer clicked, we know which resource within the email grabbed the customer’s interest. Furthermore, if there are links within the email to the same page, we can tell which one was used. More than just allowing us to see if the email campaign as a whole is successful, we can see what individual components worked the best and what can be improved. Over time, our efforts get more and more targeted.

All these are tied back to a centralized analytics platform (we’re partial to Google Analytics) and we take action on those insights regularly.

I don’t want to oversell this - there are always going to be limitations to how perfect our data is, and what factors affect the accuracy of tracking. There will always be people who see a print ad, are influenced by it, but don’t take immediate action. A day later, they remember your product, search for you online, and end up purchasing it. That sale wouldn’t be attributed to the print ad.

There are ways we can estimate how much tracking data is lost by things like that (expert judgement, polls, industry data), but even without that, this methodology is an order of magnitude more useful than less sophisticated methods.

Once you’ve got comprehensive lead and purchase source tracking set up, and pair that with real numbers, you’ll finally be able to look at your marketing campaigns and see what “magic money-making machines” you have, you’ll be able to scale those up and profit. And we’d love to help with that.