Digital marketing campaigns are often expensive, but they are necessary. Without a strong presence online, it can be difficult to grow your business. However, without a powerful digital marketing strategy, you can’t unleash the full potential of your campaigns.
Just like other modes of marketing, you need to determine the return on investment of your digital marketing campaigns. However, there are a variety of metrics that you can track when it comes to measuring the ROI of your digital marketing campaigns. Thus, it’s necessary to know which ones to measure and which ones to avoid.
Here are five innovative ways to improve your digital marketing campaign’s ROI:
1. Establish campaign goals
When you create business goals, you consider multiple factors that could impact your journey to achieving your goal.
Some organizations use “SMART” goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. This strategy can help you plan your approach to reach the goals and also measure your progress with ease.
Setting your campaign goals is no different, but they can be slightly difficult to determine. You need to determine what a strong ROI would be from your campaigns.
Remember that your marketing ROI depends on many different factors, such as cost structure, your industry, market demand, etc. Additionally, your campaign determines your ROI, too. For instance, the ROI from a content campaign will be different from that from a PPC campaign.
Thus, while establishing campaign goals, it’s important to define the purpose of your marketing strategies clearly. It also is essential that you set only realistic goals.
Setting unrealistic expectations from your marketing team or campaigns can drastically impact your overall strategy.
2. Create content your audience wants
In a digital space where consumers are constantly bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of ads, your brand needs to stand out to become successful. Content is the cornerstone of your marketing strategies, and you need to ace it to ensure that you stand out from the crowd.
Nobody wants to see conventional emails about sales or your new product launch, because it’s constantly flooding their social streams and inboxes. Customers seek value and personal connections with a brand.
That is why it’s necessary to ensure that your content is always personalized for your target audience. Once you figure out your target audience, you can create content accordingly. It can be defined based on their interests, demographics, location, gender, etc.
However, personalization isn’t the only thing that matters. Here are some other factors that you need to keep in mind while creating content:
- Create valuable content – Your goal should be to provide value to your audience through your content. Create content that is aimed at solving their problems. You should also consider giving good recommendations to them through it.
- Make your content user-centric – From sharing content about your product or services to engaging with your audience regularly via emails, be sure to connect with your audience on a personal level.
- Conduct regular surveys – The best way to determine what your audience really wants and expects from your brand is to ask them directly. Conduct regular surveys, polls, Q&A sessions, and webinars to communicate with your customers. Once you have gathered information, analyze it, and identify common points that will help you understand their needs better. This will enable you to create better-personalized content for them.
- Influencer marketing – You can collaborate with influencers in your niche to create stellar content targeted at your audience. They know exactly what kind of content their audiences are likely to engage with. By creating content by partnering with an influencer, you open your brand to new prospects and leads. For example, Fiji, a famous water brand, collaborated with Danielle Bernstein, a successful influencer who runs WeWoreWhat to promote their campaign.
3. Use predictive analytics
Predictive analytics is an essential tool that can help you measure and boost your ROI. It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to draw insights generated through massive datasets, models, and algorithms to predict the future behavior of consumers.
Predictive analytics also assists marketers in identifying and prioritizing leads to determine the ideal customer base that is closest to conversion. It also helps improve customer retention efforts and increase conversion rates as marketers are better equipped with relevant information that enables them to understand customers’ needs.
It also empowers marketers to plan informed and efficient marketing strategies that will yield the best results based on consumer behavior. Marketers can focus on where to spend more based on the value the customer generates and identify the channels they’re most likely to engage with.
AI-powered tools like Cortex use predictive analysis to figure out your audience preferences. It analyzes data to figure out what visual content will work the best with your audience and creates high-quality social media content for you.
4. Leverage automation technology
Marketers are increasingly looking for efficient marketing automation tools that can perform simple and regular tasks to reduce their expenses. This is perhaps the reason why the market for marketing automation tools is expected to grow to $6.4 billion by 2024.
Automation tools can perform repetitive tasks such as housing images and documents, managing email lists, and managing various other functions. By leveraging automation technology, you can focus on complex strategies that require more creativity and effort.
For instance, AI chatbots can help you improve your customer satisfaction by automating your customer service operations.
You can use chatbots like Bold360 or build your own using Dialogflow.
Here are some other benefits of using automation technology:
- Increase revenue by enhancing customer retention
- Improve team accountability
- Decrease staffing costs
- Offer more space for creativity and boosts productivity
- Help target potential customers across various channels with minimal effort
- Save time by managing your social media campaigns
5. Avoid vanity metrics
When you measure the progress of your campaign, you should be wary of the parameters that you choose to track. Some metrics might be vanity metrics that can distract you from your business goals.
Typical vanity metrics in marketing include press release shares, Facebook fans, raw pageviews, registered users and others that often do not correlate with revenue.
While these metrics give some insights into how your marketing strategy is working, they do not directly impact the ROI of your marketing efforts. In fact, vanity metrics siphon focus and effort away from things that actually matter and hold value.
However, there are several useful metrics that you should definitely track. These include your click-through rate, engagement rate, reach and more. By monitoring them, you can figure out how your campaigns are performing and accordingly modify them to grow your brand even further.
Takeaways
You can increase your ROI by frequently experimenting with your marketing strategies and cutting out distractions. Remember to set clear goals for your marketing campaigns so that you can align your efforts to reach them.
Also, use predictive analytics and create content that’s relevant to your target audience. You should also leverage automation to automate simple and repetitive tasks. Lastly, when you measure the progress of your campaign, avoid spending too much time on vanity metrics.
Gaurav Sharma is the founder of Attrock, a digital marketing company. He works closely with top marketing influencers and has helped numerous brands, e-commerce firms and SaaS companies grow. He is also a certified Google Analytics and Google Adwords specialist and regularly contributes to reputable publications like HuffPost, TechCrunch and many more.
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