The digital marketing landscape is a sophisticated and ever-changing one. Its value cannot be denied, especially with the advent of e-commerce, digital content, and the online market, as a whole. To keep up with these advancing times, marketers all over the world have taken towards developing and refining marketing strategies to keep business going.
A digital marketing campaign is an investment that has no singular method of measuring the exact return on investment. Digital marketing, with all its complexities, faces the challenge of continuously defining this.
WHat contributes to ROI in digital marketing?
There are two ways that ROI is typically measured in the digital marketing sphere concretely: attracting more visitors to your business and converting people who show up at your business into leads. While these two are good general indicators of a positive ROI, they are not the only metrics indicative of whether a campaign delivers actual returns.
There are measures that exist beyond outcomes
A specific outcome might now account for other opportunities for ROI in a network of complex, interrelated events.
Though a basic example, a situation like mounting a social media event to promote your newest product can be measured by the number of likes and shares. Focusing solely on this metric can lead to unfavorable results, especially if customer experiences in purchasing the new product leading up to the event have been overwhelmingly negative.
By focusing on the number of engagements as your only metric, you’ve only succeeded in giving unhappy customers a platform to air their grievances. While you may have gained more likes, shares, and an overall high engagement rating from customers who received proper feedback and attention, the overall returns you get from the event were compromised by the negative perception of the less-than-satisfied customers.
When measuring ROI in digital marketing, consider measures that exist beyond tangible outcomes. Try instead to calculate returns based on insights from other KPIs as well.
Metrics alone are insufficient
The statistics that you get from your reports are only as useful as the interpretations that come with it. Numbers are hardly anything without actionable insights, so it’s crucial not to base positive returns without reading between the lines of these metrics. Such insights will provide a more comprehensive view of a campaign’s positives and negatives, both qualitative and quantitative.
For instance, measuring something like likes can give some information about how many visitors a page receives. This, however, is only a piece of the puzzle. For instance, likes and followers alike can be gained through favors, as is often the case when a new business page starts on a social media platform. However, the quality of your content and overall user experience is more indicative of whether or not they’ll engage with your product, regardless of the likes or follows.
If you’ve determined that customer satisfaction is one of the determinants of market performance, then measuring this is sensible. To get better insights, don’t stop at measuring customer satisfaction; see how it impacts your different KPIs, such as average time per conversion and attrition rates, to look at performance over time across the board rather than on a points basis.
Apart from relying on your data reports, a social media marketing consultant or Facebook marketing consultant can provide more valuable and predictive insights beyond the ones generated by dashboards.
Using KPIs to measure ROI
It’s all about making intelligent predictions using your performance indicators to concretize your ROI. How do shares, search page result rankings, and the amount of website tracking translate into ROI? The key is to measure how the customers attracted through these methods are converted to paying consumers.
For instance, if an increased number of blogger outreaches generate more interactions with leads, there’s a greater chance that your brand will gain more authority and recognition, leading to more sales. This is an example of how greater online visibility and engagement via KPIs can generate sales and revenue—the most tangible measure of returns for any marketing campaign.
Conclusion
Measuring ROI in digital marketing is dependent on so many factors, such as industry, audience behavior, and business size. Sometimes returns aren’t always represented well by metrics or revenue alone. Putting together the different KPIs can lend better insights to reflect a complete picture of how a digital marketing campaign brings back positive returns in many aspects.
Even the most experienced business owners need a digital marketing consultant’s insight to help measure their digital campaign’s ROI. Here at Marketing Consultant, our goal is to provide marketing information to prospective clients by developing a website of marketers and their services. To learn more, visit our website today.