We social media marketers at Marketing Ignite will cover for your long list of objectives in marketing your brand in the first place, which includes bringing brand awareness across your target audience through the Internet and establishing Return on Investment (ROI).
ROI or Return of Investment — in its most basic terms — is the amount of money you get from investing or putting money into something, be it land or your business. In business terms, a successful company is partly defined by a healthy ROI.
Let's take a look at how to increase your ROI from digital marketing. You should specifically know metrics to monitor and which tools to use.
Reasons Behind Rising Digital Advertising Costs
If you've been paying attention to marketing budgets nowadays, you'll notice that not even 10 years ago, digital advertising costs were far lower in 2012 than in 2022. The rising digital advertising costs are partly due to the changing of the guard.
Traditional means of advertising like television, newspapers, magazines, posters, flyers haven't totally been abandoned, but there has definitely been a drop in their use in marketing compared to the Internet.
One of the prevailing digital advertising cost trends is to pay attention to your ROI so that you can optimize your social marketing tactics to the ones that work while leaving behind anything outdated or low-impact (like the growing irrelevance of email marketing in Web 2.0).
ROI, which compares what you've invested in your digital marketing campaign versus your resulting profit or revenue, should be at the top of your list in order to address the rising cost of advertising.
Defining a Good ROI For Digital Marketing
In order to measure the ROI of your digital marketing campaign, you should be aware of how much you've spent on it and then know how much you've gotten back from it in turn profits-wise.
Your budget can include the following elements, which can vary based on the type of campaign itself:
Social media advertisements
Influencer partnerships
Organic content creation
Various tools and platforms for marketing
After tallying up your marketing costs and gains, you can use this formula to compute your ROI: ROI From Digital Marketing = (Increase in Sales – Marketing Costs) / Marketing Costs
Now, judge the results of that formula: is your ROI for digital marketing okay, good, or bad? An ROI of 5:1 means that you've earned five times higher than the amount you've spent. And if you have an ROI of 10:1, you ought to celebrate because you're making exceptional returns from your investment.
However, if you have an ROI that is nearer to 2:1 or 1:1, you're basically breaking even. Your marketing campaign needs improvement because the advertising costs are eating at your profits.
Optimizing ROI in Light of Rising Digital Advertising Costs
In order to increase your ROI, you need to first do certain steps to gradually ease your marketing into ROI optimization. You should, for example, start measuring and taking note of your correct company ROI using the steps outlined below.
1. Prepare Your ROI Measurement Tools: Get several important things in order to measure your ROI. This way, you can immediately measure results from your efforts using tools like Google Analytics or Agorapulse.
Install then configure Google Analytics on your site. You'll specifically need to make a new property, then add the necessary tracking code to your site. After Google Analytics has been set up, customize it for good measure.
On the menu, choose "Admin", and then "View", and then "Goals". Click the button for "New Goal" and then "Continue" to have your own goal template to edit. Give it a name then choose the type of goal.
Select "Destination" if you wish your audience to go to a separate webpage (e.g., a confirmation or success page). Enter the URL slug for your goal details. Switch on the "Value" toggle if there’s a defined value for the conversion.
Afterwards, put in the amount in dollars for conversion. Now the conversion values and rates for each and every goal are available for perusal. Use Google Analytics ecommerce tools for online transaction monitoring though.
Access them by entering the "Admin" panel, navigating to "View" in the menu, and clicking on "Ecommerce Settings". Turn on the "Enable Ecommerce" choice and then follow the steps listed to finish setup.
2. Utilize Key Tools For Campaign Tracking: Google Analytics can keep tabs on the source of all traffic in your website. Your IT department or we ourselves can set things up for you. It involves checking the Google Analytics' "Acquisition" tab.
You should specifically scope up whether channels like organic search, social media, and so forth are driving the greatest value and highest number of visitors to your site in order to optimize your spend in light of rising digital advertising costs.
When you get Agorapulse, you can use its ROI dashboard in order to see which among your social media and landing pages are bringing in the most traffic and high-quality leads that could directly affect your revenue. The bottom area of the dashboard will provide you with channel-by-channel breakdowns.
a. What to Expect from Agorapulse: It's a service you can use to create a sales funnel by social profile, in not so many words. However, in order to compute your ROI for certain campaigns, you need to utilize UTM parameters during your campaign content publication.
b. UTM Parameters: You can easily include UTM parameters to your organic content through Agorapulse. To do so, open the tab labeled "Publish". Now make a new post with a corresponding link.
Afterwards, press "Shorten & Track Link", and then the plus button to start tracking your campaign.
c. Customization and Applying the Same Tracking Details: Customize your Agorapulse UTM parameters by giving it a unique name and fiddling with its properties. Click "Apply" when you're done to finish the publication or scheduling of the post.
Multiple posts can get the same tracking info if you want, so that you can assign ROI tracking and other conversions to the right digital campaign.
d. Campaign Tracking: After your campaign content is published, you can monitor the results in the Agorapulse ROI dashboard.
Just go down to "Funnel by Campaign" in order to see important statistics such as the goal value for every single social media campaign, as well as completed goals and number of visitors.
3. Get Indicators For Your ROI in Marketing: With the assistance of trackers like Google Analytics and Agorapulse, you’re in a better position to set a realistic ROI. You don't have to wait until revenue figures are out before calculating ROI after the fact.
You can gauge which marketing campaign has more promise than others in real time by traffic figures, visitor numbers, and initial reception in order to have a ballpark estimate of whether you're headed to bigger or smaller revenue.
Put the revenue metrics from your ROI dashboard in Agorapulse into the earlier formula — ROI From Digital Marketing = (Increase in Sales – Marketing Costs) / Marketing Costs — to compute your returns from certain campaigns or specific time frames.
Aside from collecting historical data, you can calculate your ROI for time periods or past campaigns using other metrics. When reviewing the ROI of your previous efforts, you can calculate your improvements.
You would also be able to learn what the typical result is for your specific business based on this data.
a. Organize and Assess Data in Different Ways: Calculate your ROI for your digital marketing for last year and break it down monthly. This allows you to know your regular ROI rate and which past campaigns worked the best.
Use these Google Analytics or Agorapulse in order to gather insights you can use to calculate your monthly ROI. Any new marketing strategy can be immediately measured as successful or not within a few months.
b. Benchmark Your ROI For Each Campaign: Keep in mind whenever you first introduce a new theme for the brand, a new product, a new marketing tactic, or a new promotion to track any ROI changes, traffic increases, or better lead generation.
This will allow you to know which campaigns you've introduced offer the most promise while tweaking or discarding any promotions that don't work. Your ROI will vary based on the goal, type, and timing that you used.
Your return may dramatically vary from one campaign to another. You can use your insights where to set benchmarks for certain time frames, objectives, and campaign types.
4. Choose an Objective For Your Digital Marketing ROI: Determining what your marketing campaign can reach from the start can be challenging if you don’t use these benchmarks. You can develop SMART (i.e., Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals for your company once you've learned about performance standards.
Your goals should be SMART in order for them to work and ensure cost-effective use of your advertising budget. This allows you to plan your marketing campaigns more effectively because you're able to assess your progress (or lack thereof).
The benchmarks for ROI can be used to guide your goals or define any future campaigns. For example, pay attention to your seasonal sale campaigns — if they made you a 5:1 ROI ratio (or a better ratio), then you should start doing more of those in the future.
Did your email marketing lack any impact? Perhaps you should focus more of your resources on social media marketing or SEO marketing if any other changes to your mailing list newsletter aren't getting you any considerable sales impact.
If you wish for a more ambitious marketing campaign goal, you can experiment and see immediate results and clues that you're headed in the right direction based on initial visitor increases that you can track down the line to see if they're permanent or temporary.
5. Find Areas Where You Can Improve: Another way to deal with digital advertising cost trends by boosting ROI is this: look for underperforming campaigns or metrics then experiment on ways to improve upon them that you can measure through your metrics.
Identifying areas of improvement involves understanding your customers' journeys towards getting a purchase. We at Marketing Ignite can enlighten you in that regard. We have you covered there, Chief.
For instance, a visitor to your site might go to it 3 times before they make their buying decision. If you have content that isn't getting clicks, or perhaps you have low CTR, you should improve upon that content or replace it with a better promotional strategy.
To logically approach driving visits and lead-generating traffic to your website, think about the 3 pages which could be the most helpful for your potential audience to encounter. This includes a product page, a comparison page (that has tables or some other useful chart), or a blog post with informational content.
You can also use software features from Agorapulse or Google Analytics to make a paid funnel for social, which uses A.I. to retarget people who've already visited some pages of your website to make them more open to a buying decision.
From there, you can make a sales or conversion campaign retargeting people who've visited the 3 aforementioned pages. The idea here is to learn from your mistakes, improve upon your weaknesses, and bolster your campaigns through a sales funnel that has multiple steps, which addresses your areas of improvement.
This enables you to improve the process of your leads to become aware of your brand or product, then get converted into paying customers. By doing so, you're making full use of your more expensive advertising budget by improving your overall ROI.
6. Produce Content With Higher Value: Sure, this is easier said than done. However, it is also a necessity. Don't worry, Marketing Ignite will help you in every step of the way in dealing with rising digital advertising costs through ROI optimization!
You can improve upon your poor-performing webpages, social media posts, and neglected content through the following techniques.
a. Improve Your Social Media Messages: Take some time to examine if your social media captions truly capture the attention of your audience. Revisit your "brand voice" and your means of producing social media text to ensure a solid and uniform "brand identity".
Read customer feedback, email, comments, and direct messages to know what your audience thinks. Also, speak your audience's language and appeal to their interests. Make a copy that resonates to what your clientele wants.
Additionally, use calls-to-action in order to compel people to take the right action. It's for this same reason that YouTubers say, "Hit that like button and smash that bell!" It's due to how effective they are in making your visitors do what you want.
b. Publish Content That’s Relevant to Your Target Audience: Have an unbiased review of your website content and social media posts. If they are mostly pitches for your products and services, they likely do not offer sufficient value to your readers.
You should be able to assist your customers get the info they need, especially when it comes to your blog posts full of company-related guides and "How to" articles.
Read your customer messages and comments to create your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) webpage. You can also develop your web copies, advertisements, marketing articles, and so on based on the feedback of your own audience.
It might seem like a drag to measure each and every metric entering your website to make ROI improvement a number's game—kind of like measuring calories or sugar intake.
However, careful ROI tracking works and when you get used to it, your business will take off like a well-oiled machine because every marketing plan is based on such data.
Understand the Business and ROI Impact of Social Media in 2022
Social media's impact on businesses isn't limited to Twitter accounts complaining about a company doing a politically incorrect thing and calling for customers to boycott them and whatnot until they issue an apology.
Social media is in many ways what the Internet simply is for many people. Instead of going to Google to look for sites, Facebook and Twitter are the sites they go straight to.
A New Medium to Explore: Social media can positively or negatively impact your company and brand by your use of your own social media accounts and how you engage your followers or subscribers. One way to get positive ROI is through savvy use of social media marketing.
Multiple Platforms to Choose from: Legacy platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook as well as newer platforms like Instagram and Tik-Tok can be used to spread awareness of your brands through the use of viral marketing, memetics or "memes", and reputation management.
How it Affects ROI: If you want better returns, you can depend on our agency Marketing Ignite to map out your course towards Internet marketing optimization that naturally involves better lead conversion and audience engagement on your social media platforms.
It Allows You to Hit Goals and Achieve Growth: Even outside of social media engagement, being savvy enough to identify emerging trends from Tik-Tok or the latest trending topics on Facebook and Twitter can mean the world to establishing brand awareness for your company.
One way to curb costs as far as digital advertising cost trends are concerned is to utilize the viral power of social media, using tactics that might not even cost you a cent (a boon for startups for sure).
Make Marketing Ignite the Blueprint of Your Brand
In light of rising digital advertising costs, we can reassure you that you'll have maximum return of investment from availing our services.
We have loads of experience in establishing online brands as well as data on digital advertising cost trends! Instead of making your younger audience cringe with your attempts at relating to them through the Internet, use
Use Marketing Ignite as your blueprint in establishing your brand and digital marketing strategies to make the most of your advertising budget without breaking the bank. Instead, let your investment pay immediate dividends and then some with us!
It great read regarding the various types of effective digital marketing strategies. Thanks for this.