Do you measure ROI metrics of your marketing contents?
All of us are working hard to get successful results in order to get a positive Return on Investment, ROI. The meaning of Investment may vary for each department, such as marketing budget, time spent, labor. When or how do you define ROI outputs as good results?
Most of you probably know this phrase : “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” or:
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” - Peter Drucker
OK, then the question is how do we measure ROI? Which methods should you use to measure it? Let’s look closely at marketing and particularly marketing documents.
Define Inputs and Outputs
There are hundreds of types of documents and millions of them (yes, it’s hyperbole but it’s true, right?) are created and pass into different stages like;
- Designing
- Writing
- Translating
- Checking (and constant rechecking)
- Approving
- Printing
- Publishing
- Distributing
Did we forget any steps? Probably! There’s always a never-ending stack of tasks to do, I’m sure you can think of a few right now!
White papers, technical documents , brochures, case studies, leaflets, product specifications, fact sheets, manuals, user guides, color charts and other documents that are generated and updated yearly or periodically. These documents and these labors are our inputs. Creating all marketing documents takes too much time, burns your money and, in fact requires data, information and collaboration with other departments like R&D, sales, marketing and customer support.
What is the purpose of these activities and materials? The main purpose of this; inputs are based on customer acquisition and profitability. Brand awareness, promotions, content and other activities that deliver for customers and sustainable customer satisfaction (in other words, sustainable profitability). So output definitions or metrics must be built on customers and revenue, right? New customers gained, percentage of happy customers, decreased technical problems and tickets due to product or service usage error, improvement on market share, compatibility and so much more. Outputs can vary from company to company but don’t completely exclude each other.
How can you measure them?
If the point is questioning wide range of variables and subcategories, measuring these won’t be easy but it’s not impossible. The money you paid for different marketing campaign on different channels will have an uncertain impact and return at near future. Even though only the basic indicators can be measured, it’ll provide insight on alternative ways for improvement and show management issues. The most common and practical metrics to measure effective of inputs and outputs are:
Inputs:
- Average spent time; because of the significant labor costs brought to your company
- Spent money from the marketing budget for each stage while creating and managing the marketing documents
Outputs:
- # of downloads and views of documents
- Website traffic
- Page rank
- New contacts or customers subscribed by force of input documents
- Sales close rate and speed
These metrics can be easily tracked and measured. So, they’re good, practical points to start on and continue measuring.
Next Step: Calculation Of Return on Investment (ROI)
Definitions of ROI on different sources are generally similar to each other: gains or profits from your expenses compared to how much time or money spent; or the most common shortened expression for ROI is the “profitability ratio”. There are several ways to calculate ROI on the same assumptions and rules.
ROI for marketing campaigns can be calculated on two basic factors:
- The budget spent for inputs — creating content and documents
- The increased revenue as a result of created content
Tip: Don’t forget to consider the time spent for management and the labor costs of other contributing departments.
Input and output measurements will benefit ROI calculation. Factor 1 data can be taken from input costs. Output data will be input to calculate the revenue as a result of marketing documents. It provides objective data and numbers for calculation metric 2.
The mean or indicators of goods may vary from business to business or person to person. 20% profit return is regarded as pretty good ROI for manufacturing industry. It means that earning $120 for spent every $100. But for marketing activities, earning $100 in profit for every $20 spent on marketing.
TDSmaker Helping You Track and Measure Your Marketing Documents’ ROI
Sales & marketing productivity helps you save time and improve your ROI by helping to reduce costs that directly affect the profitability of your company. TDSmaker offers you easy-to-use tools to create your data sheets and manage them with other products or service marketing documents in a single platform. You will save time and money by integrating with your website or software like ERP or CRM. Allowing you to publish and track your documents in different channels with a single tool. This allows you to save your time by over 85% and helps to improve sales & marketing productivity.
Originally published at blog.tdsmaker.com.
