Marketing ROI: How Much Money Should I Spend? - KPItarget

Figuring out what your budget is for your next marketing campaign can be tricky, if not intimidating. For most business owners, marketing campaigns seem like an easy way to spend money without really understanding your ROI. The money may seem like it is dropping into a black hole.

This issue becomes exacerbated by the fact that every company needs to discover the right budget level for themselves because marketing campaigns differ from industry to industry, and company to company. To have a successful marketing campaign, you will need to develop a unique marketing strategy that works for your products or services and target market. Unfortunately, the fear of not knowing how and where to spend your money can create a bottleneck stopping you from moving forward on your great marketing ideas. To disperse this bottleneck, you and your marketing team need to agree on a clear marketing goal, assign realistic values to your customers and then measure and track your ROI.

By following through with these steps, you will find that you can continually improve your ROI by tweaking your marketing plan, and the entire plan will become much easier to implement as it unfolds.

Identify a Clear Marketing Goal

Start off by identifying a clear goal for your marketing plan. A best practice is to decide on a long-term goal, and then break it down into smaller interim goals. Your goals will be unique to your company, and for each campaign. Depending on how your business operates, you may use several metrics in your planning including revenues, gross sales or leads. However you structure your campaign; you will need to continually measure and reassess the progress and efficiency of your campaign.

Assign a Realistic Value to Customers

To help you plan your marketing campaign strategy, you will need to assign a realistic value to a targeted prospect. Questions you can ask yourself to help determine this value are:

• What is a customer worth over the life cycle of your product or service?
• What is the cost per customer per the conversion analysis?

The way to determine the cost is to work backward from the signed customer. How many qualified leads does it take to get a signed contract? How many PPC ads (or other marketing methods) do you need to run to get a qualified lead? How many labor hours does it take to accomplish all of these tasks?

Measure and Track ROI

One of the most important parts of any marketing campaign is creating trackable and measurable data. You need to be able to track the metrics in order to understand how successful your campaign is. Set up the tracking system before your campaign starts and periodically analyze the results. You can learn a lot from these metrics and improve your campaign the more you learn. There are several tools that can automate the tracking and measurement for you. By creating links for your landing page with the tracking code embedded, you will get real-time data that you can analyze quickly for a fast turnaround.

In conclusion, by evaluating the ROI of each specific marketing initiative, you can create powerful campaigns for your business and clearly understand how and where you should spend your marketing dollars.