In today's crowded digital marketplace, businesses more than have their hands full trying to secure a slice of the markets they serve. Most of that is down to the fact that digitization and the internet have had a massive leveling effect on the way companies could use marketing to their advantage. For example, today, a single viral video hit could yield more results than a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign. That reality now means that companies both large and small now have close to the same power in a market where brand loyalty is mostly a thing of the past.
That doesn't mean, however, that small digital businesses can afford to waste their marketing budgets hoping to create a once-in-a-lifetime internet sensation. Instead, they need to take a hard look at their marketing spend and focus on efforts that yield the greatest return on investment (ROI). Afterward, they have to get to work on making their successful marketing tactics yield even greater results. To help them do that, here are three tips on getting the greatest ROI from common digital marketing campaigns.
Good Content is King
Online, most businesses now use some form of content marketing as a means of spreading their brand message and getting attention. When executed well, it can be one of the most valuable long-term marketing strategies there is. The problem is that there's a whole lot of businesses that miss the most important part of the process: making sure the content they generate is high-quality and well-targeted to their audience. That is where Rocketwheel jumps in, a video production company from San Francisco with a long-time experience in the content game.
The result is that the internet is now jam-packed with marketing content that's of poor quality. Most of the time it's the result of the business creating it looking to cut corners by mimicking existing popular content or by trying to latch on to a trend they have nothing to do with. The bottom line is that there are no shortcuts when it comes to content marketing. For the most ROI, start with research to find out what your audience is interested in, and create content that delivers actual valuable information to them.
Segmentation and Personalization Work Wonders
Another common digital marketing effort revolves around turning customer email addresses into valuable mailing lists to keep brands fresh in the minds of consumers. Even today, this is a marketing technique that delivers solid results. One email marketing firm even reports delivering a staggering 3,800 % ROI for its customers - which is beyond what any business has the right to hope for.
Still, there's lots of room for improvement in the execution of email marketing campaigns. Businesses that use them should devote some resources into segmenting their mailing lists into the smallest possible logical groupings, and then should use automation to make sure those groups receive timely, personalized messaging. It's the kind of marketing campaign upgrade that can turn a solid ROI into a business-altering strategy.
If You Can't Convert, Let Someone Else do it
It's one thing to use content marketing and emails to bring customers to your doorstep, but it's quite another to get them to make a purchase once they arrive. In fact, it's the conversion part of the process that most businesses struggle with. That's why websites, in general, tend to have conversion rates that hover in the low single digits. As it turns out, it's a full-time job to make sure every visitor has the highest odds of turning into a customer and every one that doesn't wastes the marketing efforts that brought them in to begin with.
That's why one of the most valuable ways to boost marketing ROI is to simply get out of the way and let someone else handle conversion optimization for you. A company like Convincely, for example, offers a conversion optimization platform that can integrate right into an existing business website. It then automates the process of evolving the site's content in response to visitor reactions. Using an evidence-based approach to fine-tuning the user experience of landing pages in this way can nearly double your marketing ROI across the board - so it's more than worth exploring.
The Bottom Line
Put simply, an average business with a high marketing ROI is going to perform better than a high-end business with an average one. That means every company that doesn't keep their attention on their ROI could be bested by their competition, even if that competition is inferior in every other way. The tips given here are a great place to start because they address both ends of the sales cycle, from acquisition to conversion.
Since no two businesses are alike, there are sure to be many more opportunities for improvements in between, but every extra bit of performance that you can get out of each marketing dollar spent is worth the effort. This is the true key to success in the modern digital economy, and it's one that's well within reach for any business with the foresight to put their attention in the right places.
