In the enVisioning Success podcast episode, Spending Money Wisely to Grow Your Business, co-hosts Laura and Julia talk about making business investments and monitoring their success. Marketing is such an investment, with short and long-term return on investment (ROI) strategies to grow your business’s online presence, boost your reputation, and increase your lead generation. Today we’re going to look at the ROI of marketing, focusing on short- and long-term strategies and how to implement and monitor them for success.
Types of Short and Long-Term ROI Marketing
There are many, many types of marketing, but below, we’ve condensed them into the five most common categories, arranged roughly in order from quickest results to slowest results. Note that one isn’t better than the other, just faster.
- Digital Advertising: Nothing can send more traffic to your website, calls to your phone, and engagement to your post than advertising on social media and search (Google Ads). But it’s also the fastest way to spend money, so monitoring and adjustment are needed.
- Social Media & Email Marketing: Reaching out to people interested in your products, either by social media or email, can build and retain customers. Of course, with email marketing, you will need to build a subscriber list
- Website Development: Your website should be the hub for your online marketing and sales. Is it up for the task? You may need to build (or rebuild) your website to capitalize on your other marketing, including industry-specific services or pages.
- SEO & Online Presence: How easy is it to find your business online? From having good content on your website (including SEO tools like blogs) to being on the right listing sites, social media platforms, and more, your online presence is more important than you think.
- Reputation Management: Many businesses live and die by their reviews… so are you managing yours? From responding to reviews to soliciting testimonials from satisfied customers, reputation management (along with brand management) is critical.
Note that when you’re looking at marketing, you should make a plan before getting started. Just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks will never yield a good ROI.
Setting Up Marketing Strategies & Goals to Track ROI
When you’ve selected the kind of marketing you want to do, it’s important to make a plan and get the tools in place before you start. Not only will this improve the success of the marketing, but it will also make tracking ROI easier.
- Set your goals with specific marketing. When you pick a type of marketing, set clear and specific marketing goals. What is the metric you’re using for success? How is this marketing supporting that goal?
- Support and budget for your marketing. Once you’ve picked a type of marketing and goal, you need to support the creation. Talk about ideal client profiles to ensure you’re marketing to the right people and have the budget to support it (be that advertising spend or outsourced marketing).
- Implement analytics and meetings. Whether it’s your website or advertising, implement analytics tracking and make sure reports are created and sent to the right people. And then meet to go over those reports. This might just be marketing and sales or the whole business.
Marketing can often have knock-on effects that can be hard to track down without communication. This makes communication from all departments important, such as if sales are suddenly seeing more calls but don’t know why.
About the enVisioning Success Podcast
This article is based on topics discussed in enVisioning Success, our weekly podcast hosted by Vision Advertising CEO Laura DiBenedetto and COO Julia Becker Collins. In it, they discuss all things business and marketing, from lead generation to leadership. Find us on PodBean to download from your platform of choice, or subscribe to our mailing list to get new episodes and other news delivered directly to your inbox. Interested in working with Vision Advertising? Learn more about our services and contact us today
