Money talks. Plain and simple, no matter what your business does or what industry you work in, your company’s bottom line is vital to your success. That’s because it is your success. Now don’t get us wrong; money isn’t everything, and it’s great to have goals for your business to aspire toward that don’t have anything to do with driving revenue. But at the end of the day your company needs to stay profitable to exist. And figuring out exactly how much your marketing efforts are costing you and how much profit they’re generating is an essential aspect of running a successful business. With that in mind, let’s take a look at four quantitative metrics to help determine marketing ROI:
Traffic
The rawest of the raw data, the traffic that you see on your website is nevertheless an essential place to start determining your marketing effectiveness. Analyze this alongside the bounce rate for your website so you can paint a clearer picture of your web traffic.
Social Media Metrics
This category can include, but is not limited to: clicks, likes, retweets, follows, shares, and subscriptions your content accrues across social media platforms. Chances are, if someone took the time to engage with you on social media, they have a significant interest in your business. So tracking how your content performs across social media platforms is necessary to a deeper understanding of your marketing ROI.
Lead Generation
Leads are prized assets for every sales team, and identifying how many leads your marketing campaigns draw to your website is critical if you want to determine your company’s ROI. It’s also imperative that you study this data in order to improve your return on investment in the future. In terms of quantitative data, developing a high number of quality leads is one of the surest indications of a successful company. And of course, you can always split your leads into subsets based on their interest level.
Revenue
This should be a no-brainer, but you must have a handle on how much money you’ve been able to take in thanks to your marketing campaigns. The tricky bit can be setting up how exactly you want to determine your ROI. Whether you designate your revenue as your "total revenue," your gross profits, your net profits, or some other variable will obviously affect the final outcome in your calculations. (The same applies to expenses as well.) So the most important thing to remember is however you choose to define revenue in your calculation, maintain that same definition throughout your process. Otherwise you’ll end up causing yourself an unnecessary headache.
Next Steps
If you’re having trouble figuring out if your marketing efforts are working for your company, or if you know for sure you could be doing better, contact us today. We use inbound marketing techniques to help companies achieve their goals and can help your business regardless of industry. And for more ways in which inbound marketing can improve the way your company operates, download our free eBook today:
Topics: Inbound Marketing
