How to Improve the ROI of Marketing Programs

What’s the ROI (Return on Investment) of your marketing programs? 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 ROI is Really 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 scientist in a laboratory experimenting with various ideas and constantly testing, measuring, analyzing and reporting.   

No matter if you’re a solopreneur, entrepreneur, small business owner, or large business owner, you need to know exactly how your marketing spend is 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. Then sit back… waiting…

How to Improve the ROI of Marketing Programs  

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

1. Set Goals. Before you even go into any other marketing step, set goals for every aspect of your business: 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 don’t put effort into identifying and learning more about their target market.  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 spend 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’s gets measured, gets done. 

Robert Murray is a Vancouver, BC based Business Strategy Consultant, #1 Best Selling Author, International Keynote Speaker, and TEC Top Speaker of the Year for 2018. For further advice, insight and inspiration on how to unlock your inner leader, follow Robert on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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