And of course, ROI is return on investment, hopefully you know that. Now as we near the end of May on a rainy Monday, we have been covering about metrics and measurements and things like that, because it is incredibly important that whatever you do you measure it that you know what you did.
And that’s what it’s all about, it is the “What?” question of the five questions, “What did we do?”
You can do all sorts of stuff, you can put lots of effort in, work etcetera, but if you don’t measure it, if you don’t know what you did, what you achieved, what you didn’t achieve, how far you got towards the goals, what is the point?
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So I am going to talk really about eight ways to gauge your marketing ROI. You can measure all sorts of things but here is a bunch.
Now of course we are really talking about an online business, I mean a business that utilizes the Internet, utilizes a website for its advantage. You may have a store, you may have a business it isn’t really using it your advantage. Well you are missing out, you might think, “Yeah, it doesn’t really apply to me.”
You my friend are missing the point completely. What that shows and I am sorry to be blunt, what that shows is a complete misunderstanding of what it is for.
You just think, “Oh, website is going to cost a fortune, won’t do anything”, because you have no interest in learning about what it is for and how to use it.
And hey, that is fine for the rest of us and your competitors and everyone else because it is not that big a deal, it doesn’t cost a few thousand quid, it costs like a hundred quid or so. You can learn all this in the Owners Club which currently is twenty nine pounds per month.
You could join it for one month, not like it, leave and get your money back; or you could join for one month, see the road map, see the steps to go through it and think, “Gosh, that is not hard.”
Or you might think, “I don’t want to do it. But I tell you what, Mandy is great at this kind of stuff let me show her, she may want to do it.”
Remember, it is not all about you. Do you think Richard Branson does all the kind of little admin things that you are doing? Does he think, “Oh no, I have to do that. I can’t give that to any of my staff”?
No, what about Sergey and Larry Brin at Google? What about Elon Musk at Tesla, runs three businesses, launches space rockets and all that. Do you think he opens the post? Do you think he has to check the accounts because he is the only one who knows how?
So please, get over yourself, if you want to advance, if you want to be around, you don’t have to grow your business to be some super duper thing, you can say, “It’s been around for twenty years, what does this guy know? My business is different.”
All that, I have heard it all before, not just me. Anyway. Good luck with that approach. But you could carry on listening.
So, eight ways to gauge your marketing ROI.
#1 Visits To Your Website
Now you will pick virtually all this up from Google Analytics, Google Analytics is free. So visits, you need to know how many people are visiting your website because no matter what happens, if you are marketing effectively, you will have more people coming.
So if you are trying to increase your marketing, your visitors should be rising. Now of course they may be not be as targeted as you want, they might not be quality, but it has to be rising, trust me.
#2 Repeat Visits
Now it’s all well and good having someone come along, but if they are not interested they are not coming back, so it is extremely important to measure an increase in repeat visitors because those people come back because they choose to come back.
That means they are more engaged than the onetime visitors; those are the ones you want to know about and if you are increasing repeat visitors…because on most people’s sites, twenty, thirty percent of their visitors will be repeat, but if you are getting forty or fifty of yours going up, that is good, so measure it.
#3 Channel Specific Visits
So there are various channels, there is the social media, there is pay-per-click, there is your blog, there may be your podcast and so on. They’re not all the same, measure them differently, record them.
And when I say measure, just record these on a spreadsheet, you can record them once a week, once a month, probably once a month is fine, just write down the number, get someone in your staff to go in and get the number, put them in the spreadsheet. What’s that? One minute? Thirty seconds? Yeah, stop with the excuses.
#4 Conversion Rate
Now conversion rate, that means for every one hundred people who visit your website, how many of them do take an action that you want them to take?
For example, that may be to make a purchase, that is the most obvious one, but if you are not selling online, the second one should be to opt in to your list, your lead magnet, whatever, to get on to your mailing list so that you can market to them and try and encourage them to become a client over time.
That is a conversion rate, so if for every one hundred people that visit, three sign up, that is a three percent conversion rate, Google will measure that. If you don’t know how, again contract somebody on Upwork or fiverr or whatever, to set up a goal for you and tell them what you want to measure; for people who do with this, it is really simple, really simple.
#5 Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is quite simply people who come to your website, they don’t particularly like what they see, they leave. So you know, you see a result in Google, you go to that website, you think, “Naa”, you go back to Google, you back space, that is a bounce, that’s not good.
Google knows how long from that click to your website, how long they stayed there and how long they came back. It is going to measure that, it is going to say that is not a very good site, that is not very relevant, maybe I won’t put that up as a result next time.
Measure that bounce rate and the try and get that to reduce over time. By the way, most people’s bounce rates are extremely high, don’t worry if it is sixty or seventy percent, that is quite common.
#6 Client Retention
And by the way, I did say conversion rate; that could be for every ten sales calls how many become an appointment, for every ten appointments, how many become a client. Those are all conversion rates, those are things you can measure and then try to improve. Once you can measure, you can improve.
Client retention, churn, whatever you want to say, how long do they stay? So that’s lifetime value and things like that. So say if you have a repeating monthly thing, say you are a mobile phone company. No, I know you’re not, or if you are, hello, nice for you to be here.
But say you are a monthly phone company they will have what is called churn rate, how many people don’t stay. And quite simply, we are in May, on the beginning of May you say how many customers you’ve got; at the beginning of June, see how many customers you’ve got, at the beginning of July how many customers have you got.
#7 Churn Rate
And then you can figure the churn rate, you can figure out how many new ones were added in that period and then you can figure out your churn rate. You will figure it out. If you are not good with Maths, ask somebody who is. Honestly, don’t be shy.
How about your lead to close rate? And again, the conversion thing, so if you are going to get a lead, do you then convert them into a customer? You can measure that, you should measure it and you want to improve it.
#8 Cost Per Lead
And finally, your cost per lead. So if you are spending a certain amount on advertising or whatever, opening time measure, don’t forget the cost of your time, how many leads does that get? So measure so you know how many leads you will get for how much expenditure.
Because if you’re doing really well you might think, “Well, if I spend double, I get double the leads. Could we get that much?” Or you only need to spend half as much because you can’t cope with that many. Etcetera, etcetera.
There you go, hopefully that gives you something to think about. If you can measure all eight, fantastic, if you can measure some, brilliant. We have all got to start somewhere.
Monday Book Recommendation
It is a Monday it is time for book for the week. A good one this, it is called, Peak, it is by a gentleman called Chip Conley.
Google it, go to Amazon, wherever, Audible, look it up, your favourite thing, it is an excellent book, extremely popular because it is good.
Look at the reviews, I enjoyed it you will enjoy it too.
I will be back tomorrow.
