Tracking the ROI of your marketing activity isn’t always easy. So I asked some top marketers to share some tips on how they are achieving success. They really came through with a great range of strategic approaches, practical tools and helpful tips that I am pleased to share.
Have a look and please be sure to let us know how you are Proving ROI on Your Marketing Content too.
”I think the biggest thing is the tracking the right metrics over the right time horizon, and making sure expectations are in line for how long content takes to implement and drive tangible ROI. Don’t lay the groundwork and set expectations that you’ll have huge lead flow, and trackable ROI in the first 6-9 months, because that’s generally not realistic. You want to track content engagement, sharing, and read rates early on to make sure you’re creating something people care about. From there, you’re able to also start tracking conversions (ie. whitepaper download, demo request, different for different companies).”
Josh Johnson
Vice President
Influence & Co
“When it comes to tracking ROI in video be sure to use Interactive Features Many platforms (including YouTube) allow you to overlay clickable moments that happen during playback. If done properly, these moments will keep viewers engaged and lead them down a desired course of action, like a website visit or completing a form or even watching another video. What is important is that these moments are all tracked and can be used to show ROI.”
Glenn Zimmerman
Mad Bear Productions
“ROI is completely dependent upon expectations. What you expect to gain needs to be outlined before the program begins: Awareness, Engagement, Views? Conversions of any type: Clicks to a site? Clicks to a product? Purchases? In store traffic? Also to be considered: how are you marketing the content? It can’t just be uploaded and expect to turn into a conversion. An entire marketing campaign around the content needs to be developed. This will also affect your ROI.
We integrated the content calendar with our marketing calendar. We then created audience profiles that mirror our main audience profiles as well as additional profiles of potential customers…that customer we hope to gain. Once that was established, we broke the content calendar into categories so we can gain authority by publishing consistently on certain topics and layered in a deep SEO strategy. Then we layered in a marketing strategy specific to the audiences we want to reach.”
Sheila Haile
Chief Marketing Officer
Cohen’s Fashion Optical
“Don’t try to look at and analyze everything. There is a lot of data you could review about views, clicks, engagement, etc. and it can be overwhelming. Identify the metrics that are most important based on your goals. For example, are you looking to attract a bigger audience, improve customer retention, or generate/nurture leads? What are the best measurements? More page views of your content, repeat views, time spent on your site, social media followers, likes/shares of your content, email sign-ups, purchases, etc.?
Then focus on measuring those results over an extended period. Content marketing is a long-term strategy. It builds visibility, credibility and trust over time. Pick the metrics that best show whether you are making progress in reaching your goal. There are many tools available to look at metrics – for example, Google analytics and Hootsuite (for social media accounts) provide various reports. I work with professional services firms on closely monitoring their leads. I stress looking at metrics that show increased visibility and engagement with your target audience. (Anecdotal evidence is relevant too.)”
Edie Reinhardt
RDT Content Marketing
“The only ROI that really matters is sales. What converts sales? What magically turns a host of marketing activities from a cost center into a revenue driver? The answer derives from great Salespeople who work the bottom of our funnel – the folks who send the personal e-mails, pick up the phone, set-up the meetings, and sell your business proposition on a face-to-face basis. Whatever it takes — the ultimate measure of a successful Marketing initiative is the delivery of viable SQL’s.
Yes, we can and should make sure our “macro-metrics” are close to established industry standards (ie: 18.11% Open Rates, 2.02% Clicks, etc. ) but do we really ever want to obsess with these measures? Should these metrics be goals in and of themselves? I think not.
Instead, it is the “micro-measures”, the individual customer interactions that accumulate to each of our best prospects that matter most. Let’s focus on what IS working rather than on what’s not. Marketing Automation Platforms that simply aggregate our individual prospect engagement data and document rising prospect scores are the true keys to the B2B kingdom.”
Michael D. Decker
VP Marketing Strategy and Business Development
Medallion Retail
