You Are Responsible For Your ROI

Accurately measuring your Return on Investment (ROI) is not always easy, and this blog is designed to give you some tips to make this process a little easier. You can’t work towards something, or anything, be it a milestone, a record, without direction, and this couldn’t be more important when assessing your ROI. Understanding and realising your expectations will enable you to work towards what you deem important and vital to your business. It saves disappointment. It helps you to understand how processes work.

Setting goals gives you a benchmark, an end goal, to work towards. But just because you set a goal, does not make it concrete. Goals can be reset and re-evaluated to suit your business needs.

Determining which platforms you should be using in your online marketing strategy for your business will mean you’re targeting your audiences effectively. For example, if you intend to use Pinterest as part of your social media campaign, yet your business offers battery repairs and maintenance, the two dynamics will not mesh and your ROI will reflect this. Pinterest is mostly aimed at middle aged women. It’s also a highly visual platform, which fashion, beauty, home décor and design, architecture, photography, travel and animal visuals reigning in the popularity stakes. Images of videos of batteries will not rank, let alone even appeal. If you can realise that particular platforms will suit particular businesses, you’re on the right track.

Tracking ensures you are correctly collecting data to feed your reports, so make sure you’re tracking everything! Remember if you’re not tracking it, the information will not be reflected in your data, which means you can’t have a true indication on your ROI.

Correctly reading your reports is obviously pretty important. You could be tracking everything (as advised in the point above) but if you can’t read the data, or the reports created by the data, then you may as well be a child still learning the alphabet. However, this is where your SponsoredLinX Client Manager can help you, drastically. They can not only correctly interpret the data and the reports, but they can relay the information in layman’s terms for you; no jargon, just straight talking, useful information.

But at the other end of the spectrum, some will argue ROI is not an effective way of measuring your investments in marketing. Dominique Hanssens, a professor of Marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management, was quoted in a Forbes article by Daniel Kehrer that, “…most people who use ROI in a marketing context probably aren’t applying it correctly, or really mean something else…”. This accurately reflects the message in a previous blog post by our SponsoredLinX General Manager David Hefter, who aptly says that, “Marketing is a necessary function and part of the sales process”, so with this in mind you should be looking at your marketing as though your, “…marketing expenditures are technically an expense, as opposed to an investment…” (Kehrer 2013).

As your data grows, you will begin to form a better understanding of what your goals should be aiming towards and what they should reflect, which will equal a time to re-evaluate. It’s highly unlikely you will finish with the same goals you initially set out with as you become more experienced and a little wiser. This means you need to be flexible in your approach. If you insist on sticking to your initial expectations when the data and reports are pointing to something else, well, as written in American Gods by Neil Gaiman, “… there’s none so blind as those who will not listen”. So listen to the advice given to you by your Client Manager. Your success is their goal, so work with them to help them achieve it.

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