When you’re measuring marketing return on investment, the decision of what to measure should be set during the strategic planning process, before finishing the final marketing plan. If you prioritise what to measure, you are able to build in the appropriate techniques to generate rich insight.
When measuring marketing ROI, or any marketing efforts for that matter, the most important element to any piece of measurement is data. The quality of the data you collect will have a big impact on your insights overall.
Data and insights should always be the driving force behind your marketing efforts, no matter its source. It could be pulled from "big data" or by ongoing brand monitoring. By understanding what channels and touchpoints your customers actively engage with, you can create strategies that leverage those channels and touchpoints.
Hence, it’s important to not only get insights but to get the right insights. Having in-depth insights about your target audience and their buying journey(s), along with awareness of your brand in the market, its current position and how customers view your brand will go a long way to informing your marketing strategy to reach your KPIs and grow revenue.
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These measures will all help you to adopt the right brand strategy to reach your business goals, whatever they might be.
ROI, engagement rate, conversion rate are useful measures, but there are other, important contributing ROI drivers that you may not have considered.
Elements such as building customer awareness, brand advocates, and creating a brand community to drive engagement, are all interconnected and need to be measured and understood to fully gauge your ROI.
These elements are crucial in the long term to build the awareness and customer support needed for profitable growth.
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Consider including the following two elements as a part of your greater ROI. Ideally, these should also be included in your marketing KPIs as they form a part of the whole marketing picture.
These measures determine customer loyalty, how likely they are to be repeat customers, and how happy they are with the service they've received. These elements can be measured through the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which typically involves asking customers "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [business/product/service] to a friend or colleague?".
Knowing how likely your customers are to recommend your brand not only indicates the health of your brand and business overall, but also aids in cash flow forecasting. Moreover, the higher you score on these metrics the more likely customers will endorse your brand via word of mouth, especially given that 88 per cent of customers trust recommendations from friends and family over any other kind of marketing messaging.
Understanding the impact of employee engagement and retention on customer satisfaction levels is imperative. It's long been understood that engaged employees provide better customer service, and tend to stay with a business longer. In fact, businesses with employee engagement programmes have customer loyalty rates 233 per cent higher than those who don't. Their annual revenue increase is also 26 per cent greater.
With this in mind, consider: does your company actively empower employees to succeed? What's your staff churn rate like? By measuring employee engagement and retention, you can assess how well you are serving your staff, and by extension, your customers. This is also a measure which you can utilise the Net Promoter Score.
Having customer insights helps you to be relevant to your customers and cement yourself as a leader in your industry. Furthermore, by regularly tracking these insights, you will know which of your marketing efforts work, and which don’t, meaning you'll know where to invest your budget to achieve maximum impact in the future.
By knowing your current position and getting clear measures on where your marketing activities can improve, you can drive authentic and consistent conversations with your target audience. In the long term, this will lead to more sales and growth.
Want to learn more about how marketing can deliver growth, and how to prove ROI for your marketing campaigns? Download our free guide: Master your Marketing ROI.