ROI analysis to see the results of your efforts
In today’s economy, small and medium size businesses perceive that measuring and reporting marketing effectiveness is becoming more and more necessary. But, getting accurate reports might be really expensive and challenging—even more with the recurrent economic crisis. If you are going to take the risk, you should carefully analyze your results!
According to the recent study launched by the Lenskold Group and MarketSphere, only 20% of the respondents said that they have both the money and the intention of reporting marketing effectiveness. In addition, more than 55% of the marketers state that although ROI (Return on Investment) was becoming increasingly indispensable, they didn’t have enough budgets or resources for that effort. Just 2% of respondents allocated more than 30% of their budgets to measurement and analysis purposes.
It could be hard to assign an important amount of your budget for such a challenging study. Still, there are several ways by which you can make your ROI strategy succeed. Lenskold Group and MarketSphere’s study provides several recommendations on how to improve this practice:
On the one hand, you should estimate ROI’s potential on the planning stage and invest on reports and statistics which have an immediate payback. You should also increase experimentation and testing. Moreover, businesses must prepare for aggressive competition during the recovery.
It definitely takes time and money, but it’s essential if you are thinking strategically and you want your business to keep growing. Thus, it’s crucial to find out what you want to measure and how you are going to do it. Which kind of research is the one for you? Qualitative or quantitative?
On the whole, it’s recommendable to combine both methods. But, if you are interested in analyzing customer relationships, corporate reputations or conversations you should probably choose a qualitative form of analysis.
On the other hand, if you need to measure your web traffic, sales or SEO ranking you should use a quantitative research. Some statistical tools that can help you with this task. For instance, AideRSS, Google Analytics and Xinu.
To summarize, the key is to identify how you are going to measure your ROI. If you carefully build a measuring strategy, then you will be reducing risk! Be smart at the beginning of the process and analyze what’s working for the better for you.
Sources:
How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business
