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What to Do When You’re Not Seeing ROI

By Snap Agency April 9, 2020

If your business is executing a digital marketing strategy, you’d better be gauging your ROI, as well. This is a clear indicator of whether or not your efforts are productive—or wasteful. It’s essential to understand what it means when your ROI is looking good, and just how to manage when your digital efforts could use some improvement.

What Does ROI Mean?

Your return on investment is the ratio between your net profit and investment cost. Companies can determine whether they’re making the most of their marketing budget by calculating their this metric. A low ROI means the company’s investment produced unfavorable gains compared to its cost, while a high ROI means the investment was a favorable one.

How can you calculate ROI in digital marketing? Take a look at these easy equations:

  • ROI = (gain from investment – cost of investment) / cost of investment
  • ROI = (revenue − cost of goods sold) / cost of goods sold

These results are typically measured as a percentage, making them easy to compare to your other investments at a glance. If your ROI is where you want it to be, you’ll be able to tell pretty quickly. On the other hand, if your ROI is looking a little low, that’ll be readily apparent, too.

Increasing Your ROI 101

Looking for tried-and-true ways to boost the ROI of your digital marketing? Take a look at some of our favorite methods.

Blog Posts

A regular blog post is a fantastic way to strut your stuff—i.e., show that you’re an authority in your field by putting those writing skills to the test. New clients will be able to find you through your writing alone, whether it’s the result of a casual browsing session or while searching for specific keywords or phrases.

Too many companies view blog posts as merely “window dressing.” In other words, they don’t invest time in posting regular or high-quality blogs because they don’t understand how the success of a post can be measured, or they don’t see results quickly enough. Never fear—there are tons of tools out there that allow you to track those very things. Sites like Google Analytics and SEMrush measure where your traffic comes from, how long your visitors stay on each page, the pages that receive the most views, and so on.

If you’ve already been writing and posting regularly but aren’t seeing ROI in the form of organic traffic, it might be time for an in-depth content strategy refresh or pivot. Do some research on what your audience wants to read about, or what questions they have, and get cracking! 

Social Campaigns

Brands frequently execute social campaigns to achieve their business goals by utilizing several popular social media platforms. These campaigns are highly targeted, and results are easy to measure—as long as you have a clear sense of the audience you want to appeal to.

When possible, anchor your social campaigns in quantifiable goals—this will make determining your ROI that much easier. Measurable social media objectives might look like one of the following:

  1. “We want to increase our site traffic by ___%.”
  2. “We want to see a ___% increase in feedback from users by [specified date].”
  3. “We would like at least ___% of this campaign’s feedback to be positive.”
  4. “We want this social campaign to contribute to at least a ___% increase in sales.”

Once you have a strong sense of both your target audience and your campaign goals, it’s time to set things in motion! And, let’s be real, that can look like taking any number of actions (depending on your demographic, of course). Maybe your campaign involves providing incentives to those who leave feedback—incentives that are relevant to your brand, of course! You may even decide to curate the look of your website (the color scheme, graphics, etc.) to reflect and remind viewers that the campaign is ongoing. 

Once you’ve done all that, be sure to regularly monitor and update the campaign as you go. And if you’re not seeing any engagement or results from what you thought was a well-executed campaign, you may want to bring in a social media marketer to figure out where your campaign could be improved.

Technical SEO

Another great way to quantify your success is to see just how visible you are to search engines—and if you’re not visible, finding the means to become so.

Search engine optimization is a powerful combination of keyword marketing, content strategy, and internal link building. The purpose of these tactics is to drive even more organic traffic to your site (and, as a result, boost the overall ROI of your marketing strategy). Technical SEO—which is intended to improve your site’s crawlability for search engines—is all too often overlooked. If you’re struggling to produce results, take a look at factors like site speed, meta descriptions, duplicate content, and heading tags to boost your ROI.

What If My Digital Marketing Campaigns Aren’t Delivering?

If your digital marketing strategy just isn’t producing the ROI you want to see, don’t panic—you’re not alone. Here at Snap, we help companies achieve digital success by developing clear strategies that produce quantifiable results. Through a combination of SEO, social campaigns, content marketing, and much, much more.

Go on, send us a message today to get started. We can’t wait to hear from you!