At Surefire Local, our mission is to help small businesses grow profitably by making online marketing easier. We provide your business with business intelligence marketing software that is available everywhere you need it. Our software helps you attract more local customers and efficiently grow your profits from a single place.
Measuring Marketing ROI
The return on investment in your digital marketing program is important to understand, track, and measure. It helps you get a complete picture of a customer’s journey, attribute and track KPIs with confidence while avoiding stress and frustration, automate insights and optimizations across all areas of your business, and make sure that your marketing budget counts.
Small businesses need to invest their resources wisely. You also want to have the right resources, employees, tools, and partnerships that bring your business to the next level and help you bring in and attract more local customers without losing money on your efforts. You want to make a profit.
The Expanding Customer Journey
There are many more challenges in today’s digital world when it comes to tracking ROI. The customer journey has become much more complex, and the ways in which customers search have also become more complicated. You also have to contend with the rise in customer demands for service and answers at any time of day.
Maintaining Your Digital Footprint
There are also many different tactics that your business needs to invest in to manage your online presence. Different areas can include:
- Digital marketing
- Social media
- Digital advertising
- Referrals
- Reviews
- Search engine marketing
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Website listings
Tracking ROI Takes Skill
The many different channels your business needs to navigate can further complicate your ROI tracking, making it a real skill to manage. Maintaining consistency is key, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do. You need to be consistent in areas like:
- Keywords
- Lead sources
- Phone calls
- UTM codes
- Landing pages
- Follow-ups and surveys
Complexity Makes Tracking Difficult
With so many channels, tactics, and tracking methods, your small business lives in a world where you have no clear picture of your digital marketing ROI. That puts you in an uncomfortable position where you have too many tools and vendors to manage, are unsure of what you can rely on others to do, and have no idea what course of action to take.
You, as a business owner, want to implement the right strategy to improve your business and marketing strategy. What is considered a “good” marketing ROI will vary across industries, tactics, and your specific business goals. However, the simple formula is often broken down into:
(return – investment) / investment
However, the impact of marketing tactics are weighted differently. For example, the impact of your local SEO is different from the return on a paid ad campaign. This means that there are other formulas that can help you measure your ROI, including:
Sales growth – marketing spend
Time spent vs. money generated
(ad spend / new customers) x customer lifetime value
[((number of leads x lead to customer rate x average sale price) – cost for marketing) / cost for marketing] x 100
Improving Marketing ROI
With all this complexity in mind, let’s look into the different ways you can simplify and improve your marketing ROI processes in five steps.
Step 1: Determine Your KPIs
The metrics you choose to track are what will help you determine whether or not you’ve reached your goals. That means that aligning and determining your KPIs will guide your ROI tracking strategy. KPIs can include items like:
- New sales
- New leads
- Traffic increases
- Higher customer retention rates
- Higher profit margins
Step 2: Focus on Multiple Marketing Channels
There are many different channels to focus on, like email, digital advertising, reviews, directory listings, social media, and your website. These channels allow you to focus on the customer journey and your ideal customer path to conversion from start to finish and cater your messages and content accordingly. You can then decide how best to manage your digital footprint through the different channels.
Step 3: Test Everything
You won’t get a perfect result every time, but testing allows you to gain more control over results by finding what works and performs the best. Try testing your content topics, messaging, fonts and colors, ad copy, email copy, and website copy.
Step 4: Measure Everything
Testing doesn’t mean much if you don’t measure results. The right tools will help you measure stress-free and help make your budget count. You can focus on the right channels that attract more local customers and pay less attention to metrics that don’t matter.
Step 5: Commit to Your Strategy
While there are always things to improve on, changing up your strategy at every roadblock doesn’t allow you to use your insights and improve your brand value. Making decisions and sticking with them helps you get meaningful data.
However, none of this is possible without an all-in-one marketing intelligence platform that makes your ROI tracking strategy easier and automatic across multiple platforms.
Marketing ROI Made Simple
Let’s take a look at Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software that helps you accurately measure ROI.
Surefire Local’s ROI Dashboard
The Home tab of our platform provides a single place to look up near-real time metrics on performance, like leads, reviews, star ratings, and online visibility. You can also easily track the source of any and all new leads that come in through your website or online digital ads, giving you more control over your marketing budget.
The Home tab gives you clear insights, and allows you to see how many leads you’ve generated in a given time period that you can compare against past results to gauge real growth metrics.
Your email campaigns can also be monitored to view metrics like open rates, clicks, and engaged contact lists without needing separate tools.
Keep On Top of Google Tools
The Surefire Local platform helps you determine how accessible your business is on Google Search and allows you to analyze how your customers find you through search, either through direct, discovery, or branded methods.
You can also analyze the actions that a lead or prospect takes after viewing your Google My Business listing to help you identify additional areas of opportunity to increase clicks, phone calls, and direction searches.
Surefire Local also puts all your Google Ads and Facebook Ads information into a tool, where you can keep your finger on the digital pulses and make sure you don’t waste money on the wrong channels, campaigns, or ad copy. You can track ad performance, reach, engagement, and costs on a single platform while comparing visibility and lead generation from customer to customer.
With Surefire Local, you can also pull in metrics from your Google Analytics dashboard and gain insights into how your marketing is working through searches and click conversions, as well as view how much traffic your site is receiving and your Google traffic sources. You can pull word clouds of common keywords in searches, measure your reputation against your local competition, and manage your Google Maps results as well.
Manage Content and Social
The Surefire Local platform allows you to manage the entire content creation workflow from a single place, all the way from your initial ideas to publication and analytics. You can write, schedule, and publish the key blog content that keeps your website relevant and recent in the eyes of search engine algorithms.
You can also manage your social platforms from within the Surefire Local tool, meaning you don’t have to hop from site to site in order to publish a post. You can schedule your posts and stream new updates for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn within the Surefire Local social management tool.
Surefire Local also allows you to create posts to share on Google that help you engage new prospects and customers directly on Search and Maps, including new updates, events, and special offers that you might use to attract new local customers.
Update Reviews and Relevant Information
As a small business, you need to manage a trusted online reputation and consistently get new reviews every month. You also need to respond to each review, good and bad, in a timely manner. Surefire Local provides a newsfeed of all your review platforms, like Google, Facebook, and Yelp.
You can also use Surefire Local to keep your relevant information up to date and accurate to build trust and attract new local customers who are interested in your products or services, including:
- Products/services offered
- Hours
- Location
- Photos
- Service areas
- Accepted payment methods
- Business descriptions
Everywhere You Are
The right tools for your small business are available anywhere and anytime you need them, on PC and Mac, iPhones and Androids, and tablets. The Surefire Local platform provides the best tools to grow your business exactly when and where you need them.
If you aren’t a customer yet, see how the Surefire Local platform makes online marketing and ROI tracking easy for your small business. Contact us today.