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Six ways to increase marketing ROI

How do you know if your marketing is working? Do you know what the return on your investment is? Taking cues from consumer marketing and tested marketing strategies, consider these six ways to increasing your marketing return on investment (ROI).

1. Planning. To reap marketing ROI, the cost of entry is a good marketing plan. The plan needs to incorporate your company’s marketing objectives. It profiles your markets and target audiences and identifies your marketing tactics. Planning should be an ongoing cycle.

2. Making a market. What new markets can you create for your brand, product or service? Sometimes new products or services happen spontaneously.

3. Snoop. Are you missing market openings and marketing opportunities by failing to snoop on your competitors or fish for trends? Use of competitive intelligence (CI) is on the rise and can be extremely profitable. Consider the minimal time investment it takes to monitor your markets and scour databases and industry news sources for trends that influence your markets. The key is trolling for CI regularly and acting appropriately on the information.

4. Shout about your achievements. What traditional and non-traditional media outlets can you leverage to reach your audiences? Smart use of PR and alternative marketing methods (no longer just paid advertising) maximize your marketing budget to build your brand and market your product or service. A growing range of consumer products are marketed via word-of-mouth marketing, viral marketing or what is known as buzz marketing.

5. Web marketing. How robust is your website and web marketing plan? The good news is that the cost of web development has come down. Dynamic websites with predictive features, or an e-commerce website with data-capture capability, aren’t only for large companies with big budgets these days. Web-based marketing techniques such as embedded HTML tracking in emails and newsletters show what happens to your messages. You are only as good as today’s search engine results - make sure to feature content on your site that accurately reflects your business.

6. Measuring. Are you measuring your marketing programs? Can you determine the percentage increase of sales from a direct-mail campaign or the number of leads generated by a specific marketing program? The ability to track and measure your results matters to your bottom line and the success of your marketing efforts. This counts for failures, too. If you marketed to 5,000 and you only received one sale, why was this? It could be due to low-quality lists or a poorly developed website for example.

Vehicles for measurement include websites, lead generation programs, events, tradeshows, seminars and print advertising. When you use these six strategies, you stand to maximise marketing ROI significantly. There’s a well known saying that you can’t manage what you can’t measure and you can’t measure what you can’t manage!