3 Steps to Prove the Value of Your Marketing Strategies

As a marketing professional, you already know the importance of a strong digital marketing presence. But do they really get that at the upper levels of the organization? Can you prove the value of your investment to stakeholders and upper management?

ROmI, or “Return on Marketing Investment,” isn’t always a clear-cut concept. Translating metrics and KPIs into actual business benefits can be a daunting task. We’ll show you how to convert your digital marketing campaigns into measurable business value in three steps to prove their worth where it counts.

Step 1: Make Sure Your Digital Marketing Strategy has Measurable Goals

As a marketing professional, you’re well aware that marketing success is measured in numbers. But do you have concrete, measurable goals that indicate whether those numbers equal real business value?

Start by reviewing your current site performance in Google Analytics or Google Search Console. Is your strategy driving qualified leads? Do you need to increase clickthrough or conversion rates? Once you see how your marketing efforts are translating, you can identify potential KPIs to better measure and track success–and, in turn, demonstrate a strong ROI .

Be careful not to fall into the trap of tracking just one goal or metric. Sometimes marketing campaigns turn out unexpected results, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even if you can’t tie your campaign results to a specific goal, you may find success in a different KPI that still points to a tangible business benefit.

Creating a clear strategy with measurable goals is exactly what we did for global machining company Makino. After conducting a thorough digital audit, we identified key areas of disconnection and outlined a plan for success involving resulting in an impressive ROI we could easily track, which brings us to step 2.

Step 2. Measure Your Digital Marketing Performance More Effectively

You know that data matters–but do you know which data specifically can help you sell success up the ladder? Effectively measuring the results of your digital marketing campaigns means measuring performance at each stage of the marketing funnel: Brand awareness, audience engagement and conversions.

1. Awareness. Tracking website traffic from first-time visitors, social media shares, brand impressions and mentions are all important metrics to measure to see how your campaigns are reaching consumers at the top of the funnel. You can also see how your content is impacting search visibility by researching rankings, clicks and organic impressions through a tool like Google Search Console.
2. Engagement. Page views, time-on-page, number of pages visited and even bounce rate can be difficult metrics to convert to true business value. But that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable information. Tracking engagement behaviors can help you identify common themes and give you insight into what may be working for your audience and what may be driving them away.
3. Conversions. Conversion rate is really the defining metric that shows strong ROI. If you can show an increase in conversions following a new marketing campaign, your efforts will be directly translated into dollar signs.

For the Makino project, the proof was in the numbers. We implemented a full-funnel approach with definable metrics to connect with customers from top to bottom, driving leads globally and eliciting results at every stage of the buyer journey. Through paid media strategies and other digital tactics, we accelerated qualified leads, boosted web traffic and delighted Makino with an outstanding return on ad spend. Here’s how we showed them.

Step 3. Demonstrate Your Success

Every top exec wants to see the bottom line–sales, retention, revenue, etc. But if you’ve been tracking your digital marketing goals and KPIs effectively, you can show the bosses the value of reaching consumers at every stage of the buying journey with attractive content that moves them through the funnel to conversion.

By tracking both monthly and quarterly results, we painted a winning picture for Makino with data that clearly showed the powerful impact our digital marketing campaigns were making on customers. This included reports on:

• Post-click interaction at every stage of the funnel, including both interaction with content and conversions
• Trends over time, like an increase in returning visitors from quarter to quarter
• Data proving how paid media efforts drove spend to conversion

As you can see, our digital marketing campaign for Makino returned some pretty amazing results. And we’d love to help you too. Drop us a line, and we’ll chat about how we can create successful marketing strategies together that deliver tangible business benefits.