What is the ROI on Digital Marketing?
Making decisions on where to place your time and energy as a business owner is always a struggle. With digital marketing, the most common concern I hear business owners have is the Return on Investment (ROI). So, what is the ROI for digital marketing? The answer, unfortunately, is that it depends. Luckily, I’m going to give you some guidance that will help you to make a more educated decision about where to invest your time and money.
SALES CONVERSION ON SOCIAL MEDIA
If you are a business that has a product that is allowable under social media shopping guidelines, you will have an easy time seeing the ROI on your social media marketing. Analytics through Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook will show you exactly how much revenue you are generating from shoppable posts.
If you are selling alcohol or a service, social media will be a hard place to see a direct ROI unless you have a few things in place:
Google Analytics (GA)—setting up your GA properly should help you discern the customer path and which paths lead to sales and where people got stuck
The link in your bio—having a hidden landing page from your website as the link in your social media bio that has navigation to proper links (visit, shop, newsletter, etc) will allow you to track the path of your customer. This would be a landing page that looks similar to a linkin.bio profile, but actually improves your SEO and allows you to track through GA instead of having to use analytics from multiple platforms to manually track the path of your customer.
Direct Pinterest Pins—if you cannot connect a Shopify account, or the like, directly to Pinterest, creating pins that link directly to a product on your site can be a workaround. Pinterest tells you exactly how many people click through. GA will also help with tracking the customer journey in this case.
EMAIL MARKETING
I love email marketing for the simple fact that it is easy to track conversions and analytics. If you don’t want to use social media for sales conversions, then use it to build up your email list. Instagram could be down for a day (it has happened) and you would be disconnected from your audience. An email list is yours to do with what you please. Here are some suggestions:
Once you are getting 10-20 subscribers per week, add a welcome sequence if you haven’t already. Provide some incentive for people to sign up with a discount, free shipping, or a freebie of some sort. You may see an increase in sales and it is automated.
Abandoned Cart Sequence—if you don’t have one of these, get one. Even if it’s just one email sent x amount of hours after your customer has abandoned their cart, I assure you it will increase your sales. There is no downside to having this and it is automated, so it doesn’t take up your time.
Once you have 1000 subscribers on your list, start A/B testing. Test out send times and subject lines to see how you can improve your open rate. After that, if your click rate doesn’t increase, you know you need to change the content of your emails. If it does, your sales should have increased.
HAVING A BLOG
Whether or not to have a blog truly depends on your time and marketing budget as well as what type of business or what industry you are in. For example, a service business could benefit greatly from having a blog because it needs to establish itself as an expert. A blog will also improve your SEO (search engine optimization, or searchability) and if you are a service business, your website is how you get leads.
If you sell a product and you are trying to establish yourself as a lifestyle brand, a blog could do wonders for you. It will help tell your brand’s story, improve your SEO, and you can make your blog shoppable. It will also help create content for your social media since you can break up a blog post into multiple pieces to use on social, then build the rest of your content around it.
If you sell a product but are not necessarily a lifestyle brand, I suggest you hold off on a blog until you have a bigger marketing budget and more resources. A blog is nice to have, but if you have to be choosy about where you spend your marketing dollars, this can wait from an ROI standpoint.
If you have further questions about what digital marketing channels are the best fit for your business, I am happy to connect with you. You can contact me here. I am always happy to help business owners understand where to put their time, energy, and dollars to take that next step to grow.