When it comes to brand awareness and driving sales, marketing gives your business that extra boost towards success. But how do you know whether your current strategy is working to your advantage or not? It’s important to keep a track on the results of your marketing campaigns and tools so that you know whether you’re actually making a good ROI (return on investment).
This is easier said than done, but there are a few simple steps you can take to measure your ROI and develop an understanding of the impact your marketing is having upon your business. At Kendrick PR, we have put our heads together and listed a few for you:
Have clear goals and targets
Start by setting yourself some goals. Solid objectives give you something to work towards, and setting a specific timeframe in which to do so allows you to be able to measure the impact that your current marketing strategy is having. But you need to consider what kind of impact you want to make.
Measuring your ROI comes down to these 3 factors: Awareness, Engagement and Conversion. Is your aim to boost brand awareness? Do you want to initiate a discussion with your customers and develop this relationship? Do you want to increase your patient database? Or are you driven by making those all-important sales?
Always have structured campaigns
If awareness is where you fall short, your marketing campaigns and social media strategies need to focus on getting you as much attention as possible and keeping you at the forefront of the minds of your audience. As you start a new campaign, tools like a competitor analysis report are vital for acknowledging where you stand now, giving you something to compare to when your marketing kicks in.
From here you can start to track your new likes, shares and follows online, and the increase in your web traffic. Analytics are very useful in proving the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Engage with your audience
Engaging with your audience develops their confidence and trust in you. Some of the most effective resources for this purpose include topical blogs, videos, podcasts and newsletters. When your core audience start to share your resources, comment on your posts, review your products/services and take the time to interact with you and your content, you will know that they are becoming engaged with your business. Most social media sites now offer analytics tools to assess your business more effectively.
Assess and improve!
At the end of the day, you are prompting an action from your audience and it all boils down to that end goal, whether it is simply to make a sale or something more specific, such as signing up for your new newsletter. This is simple to track, although more thought is needed to make the connection to your marketing efforts.
To do so, setting benchmarks is of the utmost importance, as well as differentiating between which of your campaigns or tools is more successful so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly. It is always so important to review, assess and try to improve your campaigns to ensure you are getting the best possible results. You can incorporate your goals and campaigns into your analytics software to help you.
As you can see, it’s obvious that in order to successfully track marketing ROI you need to first set goals and determine benchmarks. With a dedicated approach to tracking your ROI, it will become easier to spot opportunities to improve over time and measure your success.
If you would like to find out more about marketing and PR ROI, dont hesitate to get in touch. You can also read more of Julias top tips by following our blogs.