Why is ROI Tracking Valuable to Your Digital Marketing Strategies?

Fun Facts About Digital Marketing

• There are 3.5 Billion searches on the web a day
• 93% of people read online reviews before making a purchase
• Websites are the #2 channel used in marketing, behind social media
• Mobile web traffic has consistently accounted for half of all global web traffic since the beginning of 2007

Before we begin, there are five steps according to Virtual Vision, a Wisconsin-based marketing organization; you need to consider building a digital marketing strategy. After going over these steps, you’ll realize how knowing this process will make tracking your return on investment (ROI) a little easier.

1. Identify Your Target Market

I will start with a hint, and it’s NOT – anyone with water in their basement. Many business owners think any person “who needs our services” is a target market. Saying “we target everyone” is a great way never to get noticed. Knowing who your customer is, is the first step to understanding how to reach them more effectively than the competition.

Building a Buyer Persona will be the foundation to create a real strategy that sets you apart from “Ralph the Restorer” across town. Defining your customer by demographic and psychographic data may bring some interesting points. A great starting place is your website. Using factual data/information is critical to painting the picture of who your customer IS and not who you WANT them to be.

Often using a web analytics tool like Google Analytics or Facebook Audience Insights is overlooked but provides foundational data such as:

• Age

• Income

• Job Title

• Location

Demographic data is the framework for WHERE your customer is, WHAT they value in service, and whom they look for to provide it. The data should clarify the high-value areas and customers your business is serving. Now focus your marketing budget on these areas and customers, but also similar areas where people often go unnoticed.

The insight in this exercise should be combined with your company’s differentiator to give your restoration business and its digital marketing plan a distinct advantage over the guy across town.

2. Establishing a Multi-Channel Strategy

As a business, knowing how to reach your customers is always essential. People use social media platforms to communicate, connect, and obtain information. It means you HAVE to connect with these customers using different platforms. It’s a sink-or-swim, adapt-or-die mentality. If you only connect with customers on ONE platform, you alienate those using the other channels entirely. If you lose out on those customers, someone else will pick them up. You have to keep up with your customers and their needs consistently; if not, you’ll be left behind!

3. Transparent Results and Reporting

By measuring your multi-channel strategies, you’ll find out what’s working and what’s not. It’s helpful to keep track of this information, specifically to find out how you’re performing using “owned media,” “earned media,” and “paid media.”

Owned media refers to the digital properties you as the company own. It could be anything from your website to your social media profiles, blog posts, and images. It’s something you have complete control over. Earned media refers to your exposure through word-of-mouth marketing, such as when other companies share your content or customers leave reviews. Paid media is the money you put into a channel to gain a potential customer’s attention. For example, this could be Google Ads or any other paid advertising. The purpose of this is usually to increase the visibility of your business.

So what’s the purpose of measuring your digital marketing?

• It helps you stay competitive

• Stay on top of trends

• It helps make room for other strategies

• Allows you to know if you’re allocating your budget effectively and getting the most out of your marketing spend.

4. Personal & Consultative Account Management

The more people interact with your content, the more likely they will become solid leads. The hope is that those leads turn into customers. One way you can keep track of this is by having CRM tools in place. These help you gain the contact information of those who engage in your content. How you obtain the information is up to you as long as you disclose that method to the people giving you their data. Examples include asking for contact information to subscribe to a weekly newsletter or receiving an e-book in exchange for an email.

These are just some of the things you can do to see the results of your actions:

• Regularly scheduled interactions to talk through the plan, effectiveness, and ROI of current efforts

• Present data as well as areas that could be affecting better ROI

• Consults on best practices for higher ROI and job successes

5. Return on Investment Tracking

Is your marketing working? You may think that your marketing is currently bringing in revenue and that it is very profitable. Particularly when it comes to marketing spending, these terms must be presented objectively. Cost compared to value needs to be weighed and measured so you can OPTIMIZE.

The first step to optimizing your efforts is to track them. Are you recording inbound jobs and their final value in dollars to your business? If you’re not, you’re losing out on it. It could even turn out that your marketing isn’t as “profitable” as your provider tells you it is. You must have a surefire way to cross-check inbound jobs and their source to get started. For example, you should have call recording or tracking.

Pro Tip: Designate Numbers for Their Web Advertising

Add a step to your process to ALWAYS mark a referral source in your CRM. Use your job management platform to create reports showing the revenue filtered by referral. This will allow you to show objective ROI numbers which you can compare against your marketing cost.
Make better-informed business decisions, and track the ROI of all your marketing.