Leveraging eCommerce isn’t just an option anymore. For businesses of all sizes, working toward a healthy digital marketing ROI is a necessity.
In other words, the online marketplace represents the future of retail. As a result, businesses from every industry are embracing it more every year.
Of course, the retail activity of eCommerce struggles without solid assistance from digital marketing. Consequently, the online equivalent of the traditional promotional strategy includes a wide selection of strategies. These include organic content and SEO to SEM, social media, PPC ads, email, influencers, ambassadors, affiliates, and more.
With that said, digital marketing isn’t an automatic win. On the contrary, there are many times that online ad spending and marketing budgets don’t match up to increased revenue.
Here are several simple-yet-powerful recommendations to boost your ROI across various areas of your digital marketing efforts when digital marketing budgets aren’t yielding enough profit.
1. Use tools to set meaningful goals.
Before getting into more nuanced tech tools, let’s start with a basic marketing tool to improve ROI: setting goals.
The mere act of creating an objective to work toward can work wonders in motivating a marketing team and helping reach deadlines on time.
However, not all goals are created equal. Consequently, you want to create meaningful objectives for your marketing that help your team work toward real, productive results. That’s where SMART goals come into the picture. That acronym stands for:
- Specific;
- Measurable;
- Attainable;
- Relevant; and
- Time-Bound.
The self-explanatory concept takes a goal and turns it into a hyper-specific objective for your team right here, right now. Therefore, take the time to vet each of your goals against the SMART goals filter. If items are insufficient, take time to fix that before you commit resources to that effort.
2. Use data analytics to track ROI.
ROI stands for “return on investment.” The concept uses a simple mathematical formula that goes something like this: Your profit divided by your initial costs (multiplied by 100 if you want to express it as a percentage).
For instance, if a marketing team has a $1,000 budget and generates $3,000, its ROI is $2,000 / $1,000 x 100 = 200%.
In essence, the marketing team has generated twice the value of the initial investment after its costs were deducted from the scenario.
There are many numbers that help guide businesses. However, ROI is one of the most important of them all. It helps discover if a business or department’s net income is validating its efforts. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to calculate ROI without the right tools in place.
One of the most important ROI tools every company needs is an analytics tracker. For example, this can be a simple option, like Google Analytics. The popular software is a great way to gain basic insights into important data.
However, if you want to take your data analytics to the next level, you can use a more advanced solution like Triple Whale. This app aggregates and visualizes data from Shopify, marketing campaigns, paid social platforms, and more — providing the real-time insights critical for scaling eCommerce brands.
This data enables brands to map purchases back to customer journeys, determine the actual performance of various digital marketing channels and advertisements. Consequently, you can explore things like the LTV (lifetime value) of customers acquired via various campaigns.
Analytics tools are an excellent way to track tangible results of your digital marketing efforts. Use them to understand important expenditures. For instance, which ads are turning into purchases, if on-site content is generating organic traffic, and what pages on your website are the highest converting.
3. Improve on-site SEO to raise your online profile.
If you find that your on-site organic traffic is lacking, you may need to invest in more informative SEO tools to boost your ROI. These are analytics tools that consider key elements that make web pages naturally rank higher in search engine results.
There are many SEO tools available, including popular options like Ahrefs. These are powerful, all-in-one SEO suites that provide key insights to improve your organic digital marketing content.
For instance, you can use them to audit your own website. This analyzes your current content and considers factors like excessive redirects or slow loading speed.
Likewise, you can also use these tools to review top-performing competitor pages and source keywords and links to include in your own content.
4. Hone the power of your social media mentions.
Social media is a universally recognized digital marketing tool.
However, many companies recklessly treat this tool as a magic bullet, throwing money at social platforms without gauging the outcome. This often leads to unknown (and mediocre) results that can undercut your ROI.
It’s important to set up social media analytics tools that track your performance over time. Most platforms have built-in analytics options, like Facebook’s Meta Pixel. Much like an on-site analytics tool, these can show you important digital marketing data.
How well is a paid ad performing? What actions are people taking on your company profiles? What posts are resonating with followers more than others? This information can (and should) guide your future strategy.
Making Sure You Work Smarter, Not Harder
Improving ROI can be an activity that requires a lot of time and attention. Organizational tools like these help reduce the workload and improve the quality of the insights you glean from your marketing data.
From quality goals to data collection software to organizational analytics dashboards, there are plenty of tools available to assess the effectiveness of your digital marketing. However, the effort required to set up digital marketing ROI tools is well worth it. They can help you continually identify shortcomings and make adjustments to optimize your online promotional efforts (and, consequentially, your eCommerce revenue) over time.
