How to write a marketing ROI report
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or the last two years marketing has changed a lot. Mostly everyone wants proof that their campaigns are working.
The marketplace is growing for almost every business. Like digital transformation and the demand for more robust customer experiences lead the way towards a new future for marketing professionals. Though it’s tough to argue with the value of digital marketing for the end of the business, most of the company leaders are demanding proof of conversions from their marketing teams.
So, how do you create a marketing ROI report for your boss that covers all the proper bases?
Today, we will look at what marketing pros can do to bring crucial data into a valuable, informative report.
Identifying Marketing ROI
The first step in creating and compelling a marketing ROI report, your boss, is figuring out what ROI looks like. It’s effortless to jump in asking questions on how you can generate most of the revenue from your promotional plans, but marketing is not always about financial profit.
Nowadays, we are also seeing a lot of emphasis on customer satisfaction, brand awareness, and engagement. All these factors can contribute to a business’s success, even if they don’t turn into sales. The more people know your company and appreciate what you can offer, the more you will end up with brand loyalty and long-term sales. These things can even be more helpful than standard one-off sales.
It’s essential to show that your advertising efforts impact the bottom line. There’s more to ROI than money. As a marketing expert, it is your responsibility to know the different types of ROI available to you and their possible importance.
These tips will help you take your Return Of Investment (ROI) marketing reports to the next level.
Identifying Marketing ROI
Step 1: Establish a Goal
Showing how the marketing and ROI connect reinforces the idea that your advertising efforts are credible and worthwhile. But, before you can start explaining and examining your results, you’ll need a starting point or benchmark. In other words, you need a goal.
Start by deciding if you want to go with your marketing actions. Your goals need to be SMART and effective, it means:
- Attainable: While it’s essential to be ambitious with your marketing goals, don’t aim for something you can’t possibly achieve. Keep your targets within reach.
- Measurable: Make sure that you have the KPIs and metrics in place to measure success. Google Analytics is a good starting point.
- Relevant: Remember that your leaders and bosses will want to see how your outcomes relate to the business bottom line. Do not track brand awareness unless you can show how that awareness will increase your company’s sales.
- Timely: Give yourself deadlines for each report. Make sure you can demonstrate how your results have emerged from one month to the next.
- Specific: Do not just say you need to increase your conversions. Dictate the transformations essential to you, the rate of improvement you want to see, and how you will track your results.
Step 2: Make Sure You are Capturing the Right Data
Ensure you’ve got all of the systems you need up and running to track the correct metrics and KPIs for your campaigns unless you aren’t able to back up your results with quantifiable evidence. While this step seems very obvious, it’s easy to forget about achieving the correct code and the tracking strategies with your marketing analytics tools when you first get started.
You don’t want to be halfway through a quarter to find that you’re not enough to collect data. It’s a good idea to set up the alerts to make sure that you are the first to know when something changes from the data point of view. Make sure you examine the following:
Website Analytics Data
Web analytics data will be the crucial component to determine ROI Marketing how your site is doing the essential information. It will help you track everything from content marketing campaigns to your SEO strategy.
Google Analytics is the most popular service available in tracking analytics data. It is allowing you to explore some of the valuable insights. These are some of the data sets you can look at on Google analytics:
- Conversions: The most apparent KPI to look for is when it comes to implementing marketing ROI, find out how many of your visitors is converted into leads by clicking a button or filling a form.
- Some visitors and the increase in visitors each month show you if your marketing efforts lead to more potential sales for your business.
- Your visitors are coming from: It’s essential to know which of your marketing strategies deliver the best return on investment. Track the impact of your social media, email, search engine, and guest blogging campaigns to find out where your leads come from.
- Revenue: Lastly, track the value of each lead by determining how many of those leads made a purchase and how much each investment was worth.
Sales Analytics
It is not uncommon for sales and marketing data to be siloed in today’s business world. Unfortunately, you need to close the bend between the sales and marketing data if you want an actual overview of ROI. For instance, It’s the only way to decide whether your leads converted into customers.
You can combine your Sales CRM system into a marketing tracking strategy. Did you know that you can link the google analytics data with the information from Salesforce to get a better overview of sales and marketing efforts?
Social Media Analytics
When they launched the social media sites, they were away for family members and friends to keep in touch. As the years passed and consumers began to demand relationships with their favorite companies, social media became an essential component of the Marketing ROI conversation.
The great social media strategy typically involves numerous accounts across the various digital platforms. That’s why it’s beneficial for the companies to access the tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social to keep on top of all the marketing information and your social media tracking data; you can build out an ROI report with the details on:
- How many followers you’ve gained each month, and how many posts you published.
- How many people that aware of the brand or talking about you through hashtags and @Mentions.
- Your social engagement rate on how many people have liked, commented and shared your posts.
- How many people turned into customers from social media.
- How many new referrals or customers do you get from followers on social media.
All the information will tie in with your website and sales data to demonstrate how brand awareness and engagement impact your bottom line.
Email Marketing Analytics
The most reliable way to get leads is Email marketing. The statistics show that email generates approximately £29 billion annually in sales. It’s essential to show your business leaders that you’re developing one-off sales through your marketing efforts and building long-term loyalty in your customers.
You’ll need to check the number of emails you’ve sent and the number of people opening your emails, how many people click from your website to see how your emails impact the overall marketing ROI. The most common outcome in an email campaign is a click to your site. To track this, you need the destination URLs that are recorded by the analytics tool so that you can report on them.
Step 3: Use Executive Summaries in Marketing ROI Reports
Creating an excellent Marketing ROI report is not just copying and pasting numbers in a word document for your boss. You need to present the metrics you measured to explain all the hard work that you’ve done over the last month or quarter.
It’s great to show your manager that you improved your social media following. You also need to give reports with context. Tell them about what you worked for the brand and what did not, how you changed your strategy, and the campaigns that have stood out most for your company.
Remember, executive summaries are an excellent way to make sure that you are trying all the essential metrics in your ROI report together in a powerful way.
Conclusion: Don't Just Report, Forecast Too
Marketing ROI is something that you need to report continues with your boss for as long as you promote your business. It means that eventually, you’ll get into capturing data, the routine of setting goals and share and what you learn with the right people.
If you want to take value to the next level, you can also consider going one step further by predicting your performance. After a while, you will start forecasting how well you will do in the next quarter based on your experiences. There are artificial intelligence solutions that can help you to do this. It’s easier to show your boss how well you’re performing in line with your predictions for a specific period.
Even if you are not exceeding expectations every month, you can also show your leaders that you have plans to motivate your team to perform competently and positively impact your business and reputation.
