In marketing (as in life) things can sound more complicated than they really are. Mention ROI to a marketer and before you know it your head will be spinning with attribution models, conversion funnels, acquisition costs, lifetime value and more. But while all these things have their place, the basic principles behind improving your marketing ROI are surprisingly simple. In fact, they’re mostly common sense.
You wouldn’t book a flight without knowing where you wanted to go. You wouldn’t keep pouring water into a leaking bucket, or judge your health based solely on your daily step count. We can apply the same, everyday logic to our marketing choices.
Here are six common-sense ways to make your marketing investment work harder.
Know where you’re going
You don’t start comparing flight schedules and fares before you’ve decided where you’re heading. Marketing is similar. You’ll never optimise your ROI if there’s a fundamental mismatch between what you’re doing and what you’re trying to achieve. Putting tactics first is a bit like wanting to get to London but booking a flight to Sydney because it’s cheaper and gets there faster.
Before asking “What marketing should we do?”, ask “What business result are we trying to create?”. More sales? Better leads? More repeat business? Growth in a new market? Once you know the destination, you can make much smarter decisions about how to get there.
Give people a reason to care
Putting up a bigger sign, a brighter sign or more signs won’t make a scrap of difference if no one wants what you’re selling. That’s because bigger, brighter, better-placed signs increase visibility, not desirability. In the same way, the best media strategy and sharpest creative won’t automatically improve your ROI if you don’t have a strong proposition and clear messaging.
Before you start talking to customers you need to be able to clearly articulate the problem you solve, why it matters and why customers should choose you. If more of the people you reach understand and value what you offer, more have a reason to respond and that leads to every marketing dollar working harder.
Fish where the fish are
There’s no point hunting for hāpuka in an estuary or trout out at sea. Savvy marketers think like anglers targeting a specific species. Greater relevance usually beats greater reach so figure out who your optimal customer is and then choose the channels where you’ll find them.
Getting your message in front of more eyeballs won’t automatically improve ROI if they belong to people with little likelihood of buying what you sell. Putting the right message in front of the right people, in the right places, reduces wasted spend and gives your investment a better chance of generating a return. You can waste a lot of time and bait fishing in the wrong place.
Fix what isn’t working first
Sometimes the best way to improve marketing ROI is to fix the bucket rather than simply continuing to pour more into it. If 1,000 website visitors currently generate 100 enquiries, you can spend more money getting another 1,000 visitors or find ways to generate 200 enquiries from the visitors you’ve already attracted.
Before you pay to put more people into the top of the funnel, make sure you’re not unnecessarily losing them along the way. Review your sales process. Use analytics to understand where people drop off. Remove friction by simplifying forms, checkout, booking or enquiry processes. Improve calls to action and reduce hesitation by increasing confidence with reviews, guarantees or other proof. Even relatively small improvements in conversion can make your existing marketing investment considerably more productive.
Find a recipe that works
If you serve up something people love, you’ll cook it again. If it’s a flop, you’ll find a new recipe or modify the one you’ve got. You taste and adjust as you go, taking into account your guests tastes and preferences as you learn more about them along the way. Marketing should work the same way. Test, learn, adjust, repeat.
Test messages, creative, audiences, offers, landing pages and calls to action. Pay attention to what changes performance and apply those learnings to the next campaign. Over time, you figure out what works, what could work better and what missed the mark. That allows you to make better-informed decisions about what to invest in and what to do next. A campaign that delivers a result is valuable. A campaign that delivers a result and teaches you how to get a better one next time is even more valuable.
Measure what matters
Measurement is crucial, but only if you’re measuring what matters and seeing the full picture. Increasing how much you exercise might help you become healthier. But your pedometer can only tell you so much. It counts steps but doesn’t give you any insight into how what you eat or how you sleep is affecting the overall picture. Marketing metrics are similar.
Reach, clicks and website traffic can tell you how your marketing is performing along the way, but measuring business objectives (like conversion, customer acquisition cost, revenue and lifetime value) tell you whether it’s creating commercial value. What you measure at the end should connect back to what you set out to achieve at the start.
Improving marketing ROI doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with a clear goal, make sure you’re offering something people value, focus on the right audiences, remove the barriers to conversion, learn from what you do and measure the right results. It’s mostly common sense — and by applying that common sense consistently you can make every marketing dollar work a lot harder.
Want to make your marketing work harder?
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you identify opportunities to improve your marketing ROI and figure out where your time and budget will have the greatest impact, we’d love to chat. Give Andrea a bell on 027 477 6912 or email andrea@tgmcreative.co.nz and let’s kōrero about how we can help the world discover you.
