Salmat, a marketing services business, recently conducted research on a range of mid-tier companies in Australia. The research showed that while 59% of these companies are looking to boost their marketing expenditure in the coming year, 1 in 4 of them (24.9%) fail to measure the results of their marketing investments.
We’ve talked about the importance of data before, so findings like these can be quite alarming. When the 1 in 4 companies who fail to measure their marketing results were asked why they don’t evaluate their metrics, two thirds (64.5%) replied that it was too time consuming.
Time well spent
But if you don’t track your marketing investments, you open yourself up to a whole range of unfavourable possibilities. Not only could you potentially be bleeding money (worth far more than the time you’d apparently be saving), you could be missing out on obvious opportunities to boost your bottom line and learn more about your business.
Benjamin Hillman, Salmat’s Head of Marketing, had this to say:
“With marketing resources tight and the pressure to deliver results increasing, we need to be asking ourselves, ‘How will I measure results and prove effectiveness?’, before hitting the go button on any marketing activities.”
Measuring your marketing investments
It’s quite simple really: The more you know, the more effective you can be with each marketing dollar you spend.
If you’ve recently launched a social media marketing campaign, for example, you can track follower growth rate, conversion rates and several other engagement metrics across the board and across multiple platforms. From this data, you can deduce what time of day your audience is active, what they respond to and what they’re interested in buying.
These insights are vital to improving your ROI and, in turn, your revenue. If you know what’s working and what isn’t, it’s easier to make intuitive and well-informed adjustments that positively affect your bottom line.
Email marketing
Email marketing remains the most lucrative marketing channel that exists, with a staggering average ROI of $38 per dollar spent. Email marketing can be automated based on consumer behaviour and it can tie in seamlessly to any existing campaign, so there’s simply no reason not to include it as part of a complete marketing plan.
We’ve talked about the importance of tracking and testing emails in the past, and with the recent addition of our marketing automation division, we’ll be digging deeper into email as a channel in the future.
How to make better marketing investments
As long as you measure your campaigns, there are countless ways to be more effective with each marketing dollar you spend. Every time you notice an irregularity, you can draw conclusions as to what caused it. This will allow you to draw a working hypothesis about your audience or business, and then you can focus your next innovation on testing that hypothesis.
This scientific approach to business is key, particularly in today’s fast-paced business climate. Wrongful assumptions can be extremely expensive, and failing to measure your marketing spend is a great way to fly blind.
Rather than releasing campaigns and hoping for the best, being on top of your metrics allows you to make reasonable predictions about what your next campaign will achieve for your business. It will allow you to optimise and grow increasingly more efficient, helping you to create stable business plans based on concrete evidence.
Don’t be the 1 in 4 businesses who fail to measure their marketing investments. Get on top of your metrics and stay on top of them, and there’s no telling how big your business could grow.
