What challenges is the digital marketing industry facing when it comes to ROI?
As the landscape of digital marketing continues to be shaped by new tools like generative AI and the (long-expected) demise of third-party cookies, marketers must sift through innovative strategies to determine which will offer the greatest return on investment (ROI). While exploring options can have a lot of upside, you can’t always justify building a strategy around a new tool without being able to point to a high ROI.
Pay-per-clicks (PPC) have been a longstanding tool of digital marketers, but the gap between paying for clicks and optimizing for search engines has narrowed. This is especially true as we’ve begun to see PPC ads listed alongside AI-generated results like those produced by Google’s Search Generative Experience.
These shifts in paid search and search optimization may over time make certain metrics like click-through rates less helpful for marketers seeking to understand the impact of their ads on sales. When there’s also a disconnect in how leadership measures success from how marketers do, proving a high ROI for a particular campaign can become that much more difficult.
How can marketers work with leadership to design a successful strategy with a high ROI?
Savvy marketers are great at building relationships, not only with their potential customers through thoughtful marketing campaigns, but also with their business’s leadership. Having a deep understanding of leadership’s goals and priorities for the company and how key leaders measure success will allow marketers to design strategies that meet those goals and to explain the reasoning behind them in ways that resonate with leadership. The effort expended to develop those relationships has its own high ROI.
By working closely with leadership, marketers can help CEOs and other leaders look at the marketing budget from a new angle. Instead of considering what is possible for a campaign with the current budget, businesses should identify what they are hoping to accomplish, what they need to do to achieve those goals, and what it will cost to take those actions.
How can marketers develop effective strategies with high ROI?
Trying new tools and strategies can get expensive quickly, and when they’re new, marketers can’t be sure that a particular strategy, even one that might be working for a competitor, will be successful for their business. Marketers first must have a full understanding of their funnel and what converts a browser to a buyer. By having deep knowledge of the steps a potential customer might take from search engine or ad to sale, marketers can find ways to make that journey smoother.
Machine learning can help businesses use the data available to them to better refine campaigns to reach the right customers with the right information at the right time. As marketers gather insights through data analysis, they can refine their strategies in real time. They can also test run or pilot new marketing initiatives to smaller groups and evaluate the effectiveness of the initiatives before spending more money to roll them out to a larger audience. Doing so keeps costs low while allowing businesses to explore their options and determine whether new strategies would have a high ROI.
How should marketers pick KPIs to determine whether a campaign or strategy has a high ROI?
When deciding what key performance indicators (KPIs) will best illustrate the success of a strategy, marketers should start by understanding their objectives. If the goal of a campaign is to broaden brand awareness, your KPIs will be different from those for a campaign meant to drive sales among high-value customers. By taking the time to truly understand the goals your company’s leadership wants to achieve, you will be better positioned to choose appropriate KPIs, and to select strategies that effectively impact those KPIs.
To truly understand how effective a campaign is, it’s important for marketers to look at the environment in which their campaign operates holistically. Understanding any changes in strategy the company has made recently, as well as what economic forces might be affecting your business and KPIs, will help marketers support their claim that the investment in the digital campaign has driven the change they’re measuring through their KPIs.
Work with NetElixir
NetElixir’s expert digital marketers are ready to work with you to design strategies with a high ROI for your business. Our proprietary, AI-powered marketing platform, LXRInsights, uses machine learning for insightful data analysis that will inform your business’s marketing plans. We have 20 years of experience helping companies like yours create digital marketing plans with impressive return on investment. Contact us today to learn more.
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