Return On Investment (ROI)is one of the most important aspects of business, especially when it comes to marketing. ROI determines how much money an advertising campaign has generated once you remove the cost of running the campaign in the first place. ROI determines the success of an advertising campaign.
ROI is used for many things beyond simply advertising, and content marketing. According to Business 2 Community content marketing is used by 93% of all marketers to generate leads, increase revenue and thus bring about business, so it is something that you will almost definitely invest in. However, you may be wondering how ROI for content marketing is actually measured. Well, analytics and call tracking are two primary ways to do so – but how can one most effectively do this?
In the case of the former, there are numerous analytics measurement tools out there, with the most popular being Google Analytics. Google Analytics will measure daily, weekly, monthly and annual figures, noting not only how many views and click-throughs you get, but who has been clicking through to the site, and how often, via IP addresses and the original sources such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. However, Google Analytics doesn’t always showcase whether visitors actually engaged in sales; in short, the customer journey is only shown so far. Visitor level analytics may be a more preferable option, therefore, since they display exactly which pages specific users visited, and where they converted from being mere visitors to purchasers. Should the user have encountered any hiccups on your website along the way, visitor level analytics will point this out too.
Then there’s call tracking. There are quite a few options available to track how many of those people who enquired about your business by telephone engaged in sales but there is no way of determining how they discovered your business in the first place. Yes, they’re calling you, but did they find your number online, or did friends or family recommend the business? However, there is a solution: a special software package, Ruler Analytics, which covers call tracking and DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion), links a unique telephone number to each specific visitor, almost like your iPhone phonebook when it links numbers and email addresses to a specific person. This allows you to completely track their journey from mere visitor (on your website) to fully-invested customer.
It may sound like a lot of work, but if you want to receive factual and useful ROI measurement figures, then analytics and call tracking are pretty essential. Certainly, the above methods will go a long way towards you finding out not only how many people are investing as a result of your marketing and advertising plans, thus determining your ROI, but also how they got there, and what swung them to engage in a sale (and possibly even why some would-be customers did not invest in the business). As stated, CEOs and business owners want to know that any investment is worthwhile, hence the reason to seek a ROI, and these steps allow them, and therefore can allow you, to do just that.