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ROI + Digital Marketing = A Perfect Match

By Snap Agency March 10, 2018

At Snap, we do things differently. We drink wine when the mood strikes, dogs are usually sleeping under our desks, our CEO is our grill master, and we work exclusively in digital marketing. You won’t find our copywriters churning out scripts for tv spots or our account managers buying space in local newspapers. Instead, we spend our days researching new SEO best practices, social media algorithms, and conversion rates. Research says that we’re not alone in this pursuit.

 

With over 85% of consumers skipping tv adverts and 44% ignoring direct mail, the need for digital marketing is greater than ever before. And these numbers are only projected to rise. As more and more consumers cut the cord, companies need to adapt their marketing tactics to meet the demands of today’s digitally centered shopper.

 

 

A New Digital Age

According to Demand Metric, per dollar spent, digital content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing. Additionally, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing. And therein lies the key difference between traditional and digital marketing: tracking and recording results. With traditional marketing, like a billboard or tv spot, you’ll only be able to track a limited amount of data. You can make assumptions about whether an increase in leads is attributed to your radio spot or not, but at the end of the day, those will only be educated guesses. Digital marketing takes the guesswork out of the equation.

 

With advanced analytics and tracking tools, marketing experts can attribute each lead to a specific source. Furthermore, just about any change in your business’ performance, including phone calls, site performance, conversions, or bounce rate can be tracked and directly attributed to a single asset.

 

Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Trackable, reliable data is great, but let’s focus on what’s really important; your bottom line. When comparing digital and traditional marketing, a clear winner emerges when it comes to ROI. With traditional marketing, you could spend $5,000 on a tv spot, but it will be nearly impossible for you to say exactly what the ROI was for that campaign. Such is not the case for digital marketing.

 

When using digital services, advanced analytics (and a good numbers crunching team) can tell you your exact ROI on any given digital pursuit because every aspect of your digital campaign is trackable. Let’s use Google Shopping ads as an example.

 

The scenario: You’re trying to clear your stock of $100 widgets to make way for a new product. You’ve decided to set aside $5,000 for Google Shopping ads.

The execution: Your $5,000 puts your ads on Google at $.50 per click, for a total of 10,000 visits to your website.

The conversion: Out of those 10,000 people, 2% complete the customer journey and purchase your widget.

The results: That 2% equals 200 shoppers who purchased your product, meaning that you acquired $20,000 in sales. You just made $15,000 on a $5,000 investment.

 

For services such as PPC and social media, you only pay when someone interacts with your ads or promotions. As opposed to guessing how many viewers were tuning in at the exact moment your tv spot aired, you can know who saw your content, how they interacted with it, and the ROI for that project.

 

Attributing ROI

With digital marketing, calculating and attributing ROI to your digital pursuits is a must. Within the digital space, not a single action should occur without being tracked. All digital traffic can be attributed to a specific marketing service, such as an increase in organic traffic due to SEO practices, or an increase in referral traffic due to social media, and so on, and so forth. This accountability is what allows digital marketers to accurately calculate ROI across all services. Additionally, an added benefit of this transparency is the illustration of support between services. When you begin calculating your ROI for traffic, you’ll quickly begin to appreciate the value of all digital channels, like social media and web design. Your ROI goes up when your social media content is well written, and when your website is modified for optimal user experiences.

 

B2B businesses are in no way left out of this transaction. While the tactics used to drive traffic to a B2B website will vary from those used for B2C websites, such as A, B, and C, their ROI can likewise be accounted for down to the smallest metric. It doesn’t matter your industry, company size, or history; when it comes to digital marketing, all companies have the opportunity to be equal with hard work and data-driven techniques. Anyone can be anything on the internet.

 

The World is Done Guessing

At Snap, we like results. Some may label our tenacity for precision as peculiar, but we lovingly think of it as a deeply embedded fondness for data-driven, strategic wins. We know that the easiest way to “win” the digital marketing game is by research. With digital marketing, you have the ability to custom tailor your digital strategy so that your content only lands in front of the right people. But that’s only possible after you’ve discovered everything there is to know about your target demographic. For our example above, if we had left the targeting parameters of that $5,000 worth of Facebook ads blank, then the ROI would have plummeted. With digital marketing, you the seller can decide who sees your content. Filter by age, geographic location, interest, internet habits, lifestyle, occupation, and more.

 

We make it a priority in our agency to work with our client’s internal sales teams to only use the most effective keywords. In your industry, if people refer to cars as “metal box wagons,” we can target that. If you only want to appeal to millennials, we make that happen. If you want to only appeal to businessmen and women who live in Chicago that own two cats and exclusively drive blue Audis, that’s really weird, but we can do that.

 

When it comes to digital marketing, market research is the key to a high ROI. You can never know too much about your audience or current online consumer trends. Studies have shown that 32.5% of consumers shop exclusively online, 29.70% shop exclusively in-store, and 37.80% prefer a combination of both. When you leave digital out of your overall marketing strategy, you’re potentially missing 70.3% of shoppers. There’s no need to guess anymore. In a world of chance, investing in digital marketing is a guaranteed success.

 

What Are You Waiting For; Start Advertising Digitally Today

Making the change from traditional marketing to digital can be daunting. But we urge you to view digital marketing as an extension of your brand, as opposed to an intrusion. While the technology and practices may have advanced, digital marketing is still marketing. This means that your company’s brand identity, voice, and history will still be the driving force behind every step forward. If you’re ready to take your next step and move into the digital realm, or if you’d like to learn more about digital marketing and what it can do for your business, feel free to send us a message or give us a call.