How to Improve Your Marketing ROI

What’s the ROI (Return on Investment) of your marketing programs? Do you know how to find your marketing ROI? Are you able to track your marketing spend to an exact conversion to sale? Do you know how much it costs to get a new customer? To keep an existing customer? If you operate in retail, do you know how your marketing programs increase footfall, what the revenue per square foot of retail space you have, or the average revenue per visitor?

Marketing is About Science and Measurement

Marketing is far more than cute and creative communications. It’s as much about science and measurement than anything else. Great marketers are very much like scientists in a laboratory experimenting with various ideas and constantly testing, measuring, analyzing and reporting.

Even if you are a solopreneur, entrepreneur or small business where you are CEO, CKCO (Chief Kitchen Cleaning Officer) or marketing hobbyist, you need to know exactly how your marketing spends are impacting your business.

Marketing cannot be ‘spray and pray’ – where you dream up a cool idea, have it turned into a groovy looking communication and launch it to the masses. You then sit back and wait for the phone to ring. And… nothing happens.

Well the cool, groovy and creative marcom (Marketing Communications) is definitely the sexy part of marketing; however, the real work comes in the science of it.

How to Improve Your Marketing ROI

If you are a marketer or have a marketer working for you, here is my checklist for improving your odds of growing your business through better marketing ROI measurement:

1. Set Goals. Before you go into any other marketing step, set goals for every aspect of your business first. Sales, customer conversion, spend, satisfaction, loyalty, costs, etc.  If you are launching a web program, what is your goal for traffic to your site?  Open rate?  Bounce rate? Click through’s? Increase in ‘Like’s, Follow’s, etc.?
2. Know exactly who you are aiming at. It blows my mind when marketers put little effort into identifying and learning more about their target market than anyone else.  You would never take off in an airplane without a destination thoroughly thought out and planned (Air traffic control wouldn’t let you). Why do it with your potential audience? You need to know who they are, where they are, what they do on a day-to-basis and what messages they pay attention to.
3. Pre-Test. Develop marcom programs and test them with a target audience before you blow your budget on a launch.
4. Test – Adjust – Test – Adjust. Develop different programs and test the impact it has on the target.  Develop a thorough method for measuring every aspect of the program.  You should be able to track each and every dollar of spending to a sale.
5. Measure (otherwise known as a Post-Implementation Review or PIR). What actually happened compared to the goals you set in Step 1?  If not, why not?  If yes, what can be replicated in the future?

If you are a marketer that wants to make a mark in the world become a scientist.  If you have a marketing team under you, become a scientist.  What gets measured, gets done.

Robert Murray is a Vancouver, BC based Business Strategy Consultant, #1 Best Selling Author, and International Keynote Speaker. For further advice, insight and inspiration on how to unlock your inner leader, follow Robert on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Click here to get his weekly Tuesday Tune Up blog posts straight to your inbox.