Marketing pioneer John Wanamaker famously once said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” A century later, a surprising amount of companies are still in the dark. A recent Roundpeg survey found that less than 40% of the small businesses surveyed measured their ROI in any way, and even more companies measure their marketing inadequately. An alarming amount of marketing decisions are still made by instinct despite the many tools available to business owners today, and this leads to companies throwing money away on marketing activities with a low ROI.
According to a recent McKinsey & Co. analysis, an average 15% to 20% of marketing budgets could be reinvested or returned to the bottom line without losing marketing ROI. That means an estimated $200 billion of global marketing spend could be put to better use each year. Marketing analytics are the best way to eliminate your portion of that wasted spending. In order to ensure that your marketing dollars are achieving maximum impact, your objective should be to measure everything you market. The compilation of your measurement data will increase your market knowledge and illuminate which prospect groups, marketing messages, and media channels are most influential for your business. This will save you money in the long term through helping you to invest only in efficient and effective marketing.
The era of Big Data has arrived, and the related advances in virtual technology include effective tools to track marketing spend. Marketing analytics has connotations of being difficult or expensive, but today’s tools can streamline data collection and analysis at reasonable prices. A marketing analytics dashboard, for example, uses data about financial performance and marketing initiatives to determine where the two overlap. The patterns that emerge on marketing dashboards make it clear which marketing initiatives have the highest ROI, enabling companies to reconsider their marketing strategy to maximize profitability.
Allow us to introduce you to a few of our favorite tools here at TribalVision. An excellent marketing dashboard to consider is Dundas Dashboards, which offers a 45-day free trial and reasonable pricing. In order to track inbound marketing campaigns, a tool such as Salesforce or the HubSpot campaign application can be used to measure the opportunities and leads stemming from a specific campaign. Several free or low-price tools, such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck, TweetReach, and Klout, have also been developed to make tracking your social media easier. These tools are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to measuring your marketing, but they are all excellent options to improve your marketing analytics. Armed with today’s arsenal of free or low-cost tools, you can easily measure your marketing and reap the benefits through establishing a more efficient, data-informed marketing strategy.
Lastly, in addition to leveraging the appropriate tools and dashboards, you should also make sure to focus your attention on a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) that will gauge the ROI of your marketing initiatives. These KPIs will serve as your barometer and guide for the success or failure of all marketing efforts. Standard KPIs that should be at the core of all your analysis and decision making include your; Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Media Efficiency Score (MES), Net Promoter Score (NPS) Paid Search & Email Click-through Rates (CTRs) and your Paid Media Cost Per point (CPP). By using these KPIs combined with leveraging the appropriate tools and software, you will be well on your way to adding a quantitative rigor to your marketing efforts that will guide future decisions while taking the guesswork out of optimizing your hard earned marketing dollars.