As a CEO, business owner, or marketing manager, you need your marketing dollars to get your business the most bang for their buck. However, this is one of the most challenging things to accomplish with modern marketing. Every industry markets differently and the competition between businesses in your industry can be brutal with every company seeking to stand out and achieve the best return on investment(ROI) possible. So, big or small, how can your business achieve the ROI you desire? Here are a couple of our best suggestions to increase your business’s marketing ROI.
1. Ask the Right Questions
Whether you are thinking of starting a new marketing campaign or reevaluating your current strategy, an important first step is to ask the right questions. An honest analysis of the current state of your business’s marketing strategy will help you make better decisions going forward. Here are a couple examples of questions you can ask:
- What is working right now? What isn’t?
- Should we be getting better results with our current efforts?
- Are we currently investing enough where we need to?
- What will it take to increase our sales in this area by X% over the next 12 months?
- Given our business size and position compared to our competitors, how much do we need to invest to effectively compete?
- Which areas should we focus our investments? (ex: SEO, PPC, Social, Email, etc.)
The most important thing you need to remember is that marketing is an investment and needs to to be viewed as such. Too many business owners focus on spending the bare minimum for their marketing and may lose huge opportunities for growth since they are focused purely on budget instead of ROI. Asking yourself the above questions will help you determine what areas will be most effective and focus on the now and the future of your ROI, not your budget. (For more help on asking the right ROI-focused questions, feel free to check out Grow Team’s book: 15 Minute Guide to Getting More Business Online)
2. Set Goals
Too many times business owners and marketing managers will begin a new marketing endeavor without setting specific goals and just “hope for the best”. Whether you’re working with an outside marketing agency or doing it on your own, you need to set clear goals to measure the success of your campaigns and later adjust them to maximize that success. Simply saying: “I want this to make my company grow”, is not specific enough to track. Your goals need to have a time frame, have measurable metrics that are used to gauge success, and most importantly, they need to be possible. An example could be: “With this email marketing campaign, I want at least 20 solid leads in the pipeline each month and 2 sales a month during the course of the next six months. As long as your goals follow these guidelines and focus on ROI then they’ll be easier to track and accomplish.
3. What Works Best
Not every marketing strategy will work for your company. A mistake that many businesses make is putting their marketing dollars into areas that have very little to no reach over their target market. Just because you’ve heard of something that has worked for another business or an advertising company salesman tells you he can make your company size double, it does not mean it will be worth your money.
You have to do your research. Take a look at what your competitors or similar companies are doing and see where you’ve had success in the past. You may also need to experiment to find which marketing channels are most effective for your company and how you can market yourself differently in that channel. For example, if you run a paid ad campaign on Facebook and LinkedIn over the course of 6 months and see the best results coming from the LinkedIn ads, it could be worth investing more into that side and less into others.
4. Consider Everything
Another question you’ll want to ask yourself is whether you can achieve a greater ROI by doing your marketing in-house or outsourcing to an agency. There are many factors that need to be considered when choosing whether to work with an agency or not. A couple factors are:
- Do you have enough time to spend managing all of your business’s marketing or would it be easier and more efficient to outsource some (or all) of it?
- What things do you need direct control over and what could you pass on to others?
- If you work with an agency, what are the additional costs (both time and monetarily) that you may face? Examples: the cost of additional staff time put in to work with the agency to start the campaign and implement their recommendations, the cost of the agency failing to deliver results.
- Do you have the expertise in-house or will an approved agency be more effective?
For many businesses, it is effective to do a mix of outsourcing and in-house work. It mainly depends on your own business’s capabilities and the choice of the right agency. The last thing you want is to spend time and money hiring an outside marketing agency and watching them fail to deliver the results you wanted. When considering outsourcing, you can always be more sure of their ability if they have plenty of positive reviews, case studies, and other forms of proof that they can be trusted to do the job right.
5. Be Realistic and Adaptable
A marketing strategy is never something that you make a decision on once and you’re done. Competitors and the environment around you will constantly change and you must adapt your strategy to stay ahead in order to achieve the best possible ROI. Remember that your competitors may be investing just as much or more in the same services you are. Just like sports and other physical competitions, those who invest the most time into training will be the most likely to succeed. A runner can’t expect to win a marathon if he only runs two miles a week to practice. After making realistic goals, picking the right marketing channels, the right agency to work with, and investing enough, your business can gain the advantage and achieve the best ROI possible.
Our team here at Grow Team takes pride in being specialists in maximizing marketing ROI. For any questions you may have on what your business can do better or for any help finding a trustworthy agency to work with, please contact us here for a free consultation.