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How to Ensure Increased ROI On Your Advertising Dollars

Dollars Being Put Towards Advertising Campaigns Should Be Worth It!

The most common way to evaluate a marketing plan is by its level of efficiency–or the return of investment (ROI) of your marketing.

The more important factor that needs to be identified is whether or not you are reaching influencers. Influencers are people who can encourage decisions, make people take actions, and increase general awareness of a product or service.

The primary goals for all marketing efforts are to increase sales, move product, and enhance awareness. The best way to accomplish this is to recognize and understand the target audience that needs to be reached.

Ensure ROI From Your Inbound and Outbound Marketing Campaigns

The two most prevalent forms of advertising are inbound and outbound marketing.  

Inbound marketing involves utilizing a combination of applications into what we call a marketing mix. This includes a variety of blogs, digital e-mail deployments, newsletters, SEO and/or social engagements. While the inbound approach strives to draw the consumer in, outbound marketing drives the advertising message to the consumers through paid media. These are mediums such as TV, radio, cable, outdoor, etc.

Inbound ROI

One of the most critical aspects of an effective marketing plan is to clearly recognize and understand your core target market. To identify your target market, the first step in the inbound marketing process is to identify your buyer persona(s). A buyer persona is a research-based profile that deep dives into the personalities your targeted customers. Identifying these personas can help you understand your consumer’s behavioral tendencies, likes, dislikes, commonalities, and motives. In other words, buyer personas will guide you in customizing an effective approach for reaching your consumers at a lower cost.

Once an inbound marketing campaign is launched, an ongoing series of PPC metrics is generated and placed. These metrics determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and can help guide the future direction of your marketing plan. This portion of the inbound marketing process allows immediate feedback and thus, better ROI results. Once in place, this feedback can be implemented into the outbound marketing strategy employed. The metrics generated from an inbound marketing approach should be performed on an on-going basis. Once acquired, these metrics can be adjusted as needed to adhere more closely to a finer tuned buyer persona.

Outbound ROI

The outbound component of a marketing plan allows for a greater reach of pertinent information to the intended target market. Typical forms of outbound marketing are TV, radio, cable, outdoor and print. These forms of marketing are limited by the quantitative measurements based on the demographics of the audience being reached. Geographic limitations can also be implemented within an outbound marketing strategy. However, combing your inbound and outbound strategies, will lower these limitations and, as a result, increase your ROI.

The metrics provided by inbound strategies reveal a more accurate assessment of the effectiveness of a call-to-action. For example:

While a broad-based demographic dive (outbound marketing) may state that your target market is 25-54 year-olds, your inbound marketing metrics may find that actually, the majority of your desired influencers are actually centered around the 35-44 core of the demo.

Combining Inbound and Outbound To Increase Your ROI

The insights from your inbound marketing efforts should be used to adjust the outbound strategies on an ongoing basis. For effective ROI, you should aim to focus on the age cell identified by the inbound strategy. However, be sure maintain a holistic approach to your marketing efforts–continue monitoring the outer edges of the demographic too!

Additionally, qualitative (or psychographic) analysis is available for the various outbound marketing forms of marketing. This qualitative analysis can be layered over your quantitative analysis to get an even better idea of your audience reach. Moreover, the behavioral traits of the outbound marketing’s influencers can be mirrored to the desired influencers revealed from the inbound metrics.

The true measurement of success for all marketing and media plans is the actual return on investment (ROI). ROI is usually found after a long-lasting and consistent combination of inbound and outbound marketing efforts. While the outbound methods don’t allow for an immediate measurement of the effectiveness of your quantitative efforts–when combined and adapted to mirror the inbound applications, the two methodologies can work together to better ensure an excellent ROI.

Marketing Smarter

Media consumption has grown significantly thanks to the recent influx of digital and social media. That, along with the growing thirst for knowledge, self-help and social acceptance has increased the need for mixed-marketing. The development of media consumption requires that both inbound and outbound strategies be better measured, compared and highly customized. The combining of inbound and outbound marketing campaigns is an on-going re-evaluation to help reach the desired ROI.

You’ve probably got a pretty sturdy outbound strategy implemented into your marketing plan. But how about your inbound marketing plan? We’re here to help.

Our free Marketing 101 Checklist offers tips to help perfect your marketing strategy for more positive results and an overall better ROI. Even the best marketing campaigns can use a little TLC.

Happy marketing!