How to: Improve Your Marketing Roi

Not everyone has a limitless marketing spend. During the Super Bowl XLVII earlier this year, for example, 30 seconds of advertising space would have cost you as much as $4 million, but do you really need to pay through the nose before you start experiencing marketing success?

Big budgets don’t necessarily mean big results, or vice-versa, but how can you improve your marketing ROI in order to make the most of what you’ve got? Take a look at our three-step guide and find out…

Be cost-effective

It goes without saying, but the more cost-effective your marketing activities are, the more lucrative results you’ll be getting for your money.

Could you be spending excess cash on unsuccessful marketing outlets, or paying over the odds for the services of an ineffective marketing agency?

Such things happen more often than you might think, but measuring the efficacy of something like a marketing strategy is no mean feat.

Do you even know what targets you should be achieving, let alone whether you’re doing so or not? It’s worth going through a marketing healthcheck  periodically to find out exactly how well your marketing activities have been doing, allowing you to cut away the deadweight and improve your marketing ROI in future.

Improve enquiry generation

In its most basic sense, marketing and advertising is the equivalent of your brand waving its hand in the air and shouting: ‘look at me, I’m here!’ Brands market their products and services so that more people will notice them and keep them in the back of their mind until such a time as they need to make a purchase.

What your brand wants, then, is to increase the number of people who notice those hand gestures and frantic shouts and think ‘these may well be the guys for me’.

Turn enquiries into sales

It’s no good customers simply enquiring about your products and services, however, as no-one ever made any money from a question alone.

You may think that marketing can only beckon prospective customers up to your door, and that it’s the job of your sales staff to ultimately usher them in, but in fact if your marketing activities have been undertaken successfully, the sales will have already been made.

An effective marketing campaign will have convinced your prospective customers that they need your products and services before they’ve so much as met you face to face, so if you’re looking to boost your marketing ROI, you’ll want to start generating ideas and producing campaigns with the power to make your business sales remotely.

It’s not easy to take a limited marketing budget and turn it into guaranteed sales success, and it’s a process that few businesses have the time and experience to perfect themselves.