ROMI: How to Identify, Assess, and Enhance Your Marketing ROI

ROMI stands for Return on Marketing Investment. It can also be called Marketing ROI and is an important performance indicator since it measures how profitable your marketing efforts are.

There are now dozens of Marvel movies, with many more in the works across multiple formats. Marvel has a great marketing ROI for its brand, which explains why there is so much of it. With each subsequent installment, Marvel has developed a flywheel that spins faster. They generate a lot more money from marketing these films than they spend on marketing them.

For instance, Disney invested almost $80 million in the marketing and promotion of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” at the box office. The movie has made more than $863 million globally. The ROMI here is 978% – not bad at all!

Ultimately, the goal of CMOs is to convert marketing expenses into a larger increase in revenue. To significantly increase market share and overall revenue, we will explain how to assess, quantify, apply, and enhance your marketing ROI in this tutorial.

What Is the Definition of Marketing ROI?

The income generated by a given marketing activity in relation to the costs incurred is known as the marketing ROI. This ratio, which is sometimes represented as a percentage, compares the return on marketing spend to its cost.

You can evaluate the efficiency of your marketing efforts, right down to certain channels and particular campaigns, when you understand how to measure ROI on marketing. You may calculate your revenue per dollar spent on marketing by using ROI modeling. You will receive “x” dollar income in return for “x” marketing dollars spent.

Implementing ROMI

For a number of reasons, marketing ROI is indeed a crucially important statistic. It first enables you to defend the money you spend on marketing. You will not have any issue persuading corporate leadership to continue investing in marketing if you can demonstrate (or even ramp it up) that your promotional strategies are yielding a sizable ROI.

The statistic also aids in budget allocation for your marketing efforts. You may determine which marketing channels, initiatives, campaigns, and vehicles are the most profitable by calculating their return on investment (ROI). Then you can focus more on what is working and spend less on strategies that are not as effective.

The third benefit of marketing ROI is accountability. In the end, it does not matter how original or motivational a marketing effort is. It does not matter if it generated buzz or how many likes it collected. It matters whether it genuinely brought in money for the business. You may maintain your focus on the end result by calculating ROI. It helps you focus on what genuinely matters for your business and prevents you from seeking vanity metrics.

Calculating Marketing ROI

Now that we have established that there are various perspectives on success, let’s discuss marketing ROI measurement.

Determine the Key Performance Indicators

Finding your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is the first step in calculating your marketing ROI. To put it another way, you must choose the metrics you will employ to gauge the performance of a given channel or campaign. Only the most important marketing metrics are KPIs for monitoring and assessment reasons.

The objectives of a specific marketing strategy, channel, campaign, or program will determine the KPIs you select. You will not be able to analyze your marketing effectiveness or allocate a budget properly if your advertising objectives are not clear.

Keeping that in mind, consider concentrating on the following KPIs:

Cost per Lead

Your Cost per Lead, or CPL, refers to the typical price you pay to acquire a new lead. You may determine your Cost per Acquisition (CPA) by using your CPL and the lead-to-customer conversion rate.

For instance, if you pay $20 per lead and 10% of those leads turn into consumers, it will cost you $200 to acquire a new client.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Both Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Cost per Acquisition (CPA) enable you to calculate the cost of acquiring a new customer. It can be used to assess the success of your advertising campaigns across a variety of platforms, including PPC, affiliate marketing, and social media.

Contrary to measures like conversion rate and click-through rate, which serve as lead indicators of success, CPA or/and CAC enable you to analyze the efficiency, cost, and impact of marketing initiatives on the bottom line. You can increase your investment in the growth marketing initiatives that are most profitable if you are aware of the minimum CPA necessary to reach profitability.

Customer Lifetime Value

The total amount of money you may anticipate making sales to a new customer for the duration of their dealings with you is known as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Smart brands understand that as long as your CLV figures are high enough, you do not necessarily need a first sale to be profitable. Being profitable in the long term is the most crucial goal.

Knowing your CLV (sometimes referred to as LTV) will help you determine how much you can spend to bring in new clients. Your model will be lucrative if you spend $1,500 to attract a new consumer and your CLV is $5,500. However, if your CLV is $1,500 and it takes you $1,500 to recruit a new customer, your business will fail since you won’t generate any money.

Therefore, if your initial acquisition expense is significant, you will need to make an investment in marketing strategies that focus on recurring revenue from existing clients. Additionally, it is critical to invest in customer relationship management (CRM) to increase loyalty and retention. In addition, you must make sure that your team actually utilizes the CRM.

Expenditure on Advertising

The financial expense of your marketing efforts is known as marketing spending or expenditure on marketing. It includes all ad expenses, including those for print advertisements for brick-and-mortar stores and the price of putting your e-commerce marketing plans into action.

To accurately assess the efficacy of your marketing mix, you will need to keep track of the costs associated with each outlet as well as particular campaigns.

Rate of Conversion

When compared to the total defined audience, the conversion rate is the frequency with which your audience does a particular activity (e.g., all visitors to a website). This might be the fee for paying for a product on your webpage, joining your mailing list, etc. Your CPL and CPA will be significantly influenced by your conversion rates. Your cost to acquire new leads and consumers will decrease the higher your conversion rates get.

This presumption is not necessarily true, though. For instance, despite a high conversion rate, your business can be untenable if your prices are excessive to begin with. For instance, if your margin is -15% and your cost per lead is $150, achieving a high conversion rate just implies you will lose money more quickly. For starters, confirm if the concept is profitable. For increased conversion rates, only then should you step on the gas.

Attribution of Marketing

Identification and value assignment of customer engagements along the conversion route is known as marketing attribution. The objective of attribution is to identify the interactions (so-called touchpoints) that have the most impact on your prospect and lead to a sale. An attribution model which reliably assigns credits to your various channels of marketing along the route to purchase is what you ultimately desire.

When you consider the complete funnel of experiences, it is probable that content and SEO played a significantly greater part in generating the sale, despite the fact that many of your customers may finally convert to a PPC ad. With this knowledge in hand, you may systematically increase your SEO but also content investments.

Among the attribution models are:

• Attribution of a first touch
• Attribution of the last touch
• Attribution of multiple touches
• Attribution of multiple sources with weights

Reputation of a Brand

The feelings that your clients have about your business are summed up as brand reputation. Customers are more inclined to purchase your goods or services and refer your firm to family and friends if they have a favorable opinion of your brand. Greater ROMI and LTV are directly correlated with improved brand perception.

Net Promoter Score, Google SERP sentiment, reviews, polls, focus groups, social analytics (reach, following, etc.), engagement analytics (page views, dwell time, etc.), and other methods are some of the techniques to gauge brand perception. As your marketing efforts progress, boosting brand perception will help you achieve better results overall. This entails always upholding your core principles and acting honorably as a brand.

Marketing ROI

In the end, the most crucial statistic to monitor is your marketing ROI. This KPI will let you know if your marketing campaign was eventually successful.

Your brand will be more profitable the more you’re able to increase your ROI.

What Is a Good Marketing ROI?

A positive marketing ROI, in its most basic sense, indicates that you are recovering more than one dollar for every dollar spent on marketing. However, the truth is that industry and marketing channel-specific ROI benchmarks exist.

For instance, organic search offers a significant edge over sponsored, with an average ROI of 5.3 times, based on the Google Economic Impact Report. Google believes that the ROI of PPC is roughly two times higher. In general, a successful marketing ROI is in the range of 5:1. Make sure, nevertheless, that your comparisons are apples to apples when assessing your ROI. To determine if your marketing is actually effective, compare by industry and distribution channel. Your ROI for digital marketing, for instance, can be different from your ROI for offline marketing.

Looking at the results from comparable strategies the brand has employed in the past is another approach for it to establish a good ROI standard (one that is unique to that brand). The brand could then evaluate present and upcoming marketing campaigns against that standard.

Measurement of ROMI: Challenges

Here is a straightforward marketing ROI formula: [(Revenue Made – Marketing Expenses) / Marketing Expenses] * 100

Therefore, your basic ROI is 100% if you invest $5,000 in a campaign that brings you $10,000 in revenue. The issue is that things are rarely this straightforward.

Why Is It Challenging To Calculate Marketing ROI?

TrackMaven depicted a wide range of difficulties marketers claim to encounter when attempting to demonstrate their worth: The biggest one is attributing social and content to revenue (71.11%), followed by aligning KPIs with overall business goals (48.89%) and attributing leads to revenue (46.67%). Because they are ongoing, marketing initiatives are difficult to quantify. However, we compute ROI over particular timeframes. In order to measure marketing ROI, a particular start and end date are required.

The problem of choosing the right measures to measure comes next. Do you keep track of net or gross revenue? Do your calculations take LTV into account? How can the precise amount of money that a specific touchpoint, channel, or campaign generates be determined? What about the effect on audience expansion or brand awareness?

In addition, many initiatives last for several months, making it challenging to determine the ROI before the campaign is over. Conversion rate is one example of a leading indicator that can be useful. But without the final figures, it is impossible to determine your ROI. Without a strong attribution model in place, it is also very challenging to calculate the ROI of marketing effectively. Attribution models are seldom impenetrable, though.

ROI in marketing initially appears to be a fairly straightforward estimate. But the more you delve into it, the more intricate it can grow. It is calculated slightly differently by various companies. For instance, using the method shown below to determine ROMI is very much suggested:

[((lead-to-customer rate * number of leads * average sales price) – cost or ad spend) / ad spend or cost] * 100

In the end, you have to choose which figures should be included and which variables are most crucial for your specific company when evaluating ROI on marketing.

Guidelines for Measuring Marketing ROI

Here are some recommended practices you have to adhere to in light of how difficult it can be to determine and monitor marketing ROI.

Follow the Proper Metrics

First and foremost, only monitor the indicators that have a direct impact on your company’s success. Although having a large following on social media could cause you to feel good, does it actually help your business’s bottom line?

There should be fundamental distinctions between the cash spent and the value given to your company in order to justify your advertising expenditures. Saying that you invested $10,000 and earned thousands of followers is one thing. Saying that you paid $10,000 to obtain 500 leads, of which 50 will become customers, is far different from saying that.

Comprehend Attribution Models

Second, be familiar with the various marketing attribution models. This might make it clearer for you how to balance the various marketing touchpoints in your clients’ experience.

Adobe Analytics, Nielsen Marketing Attribution, and C3 Metrics are examples of marketing attribution software.

Assemble Data

Third, gather and examine as much data as you can on each conventional and digital channel, marketing, and so forth. Why? Because until you visualize the data in front of you, you will not know what is actually going on. Without knowing how many leads, conversions, and clicks each campaign generates, you will not be able to compare the ROI of SEO and PPC.

Obtain as much data as you can because ROI calculations are data-driven.

Include All Expenses

Finally, it is beneficial to include variable and overhead costs in your calculations when determining ROI, if at all practical.

For instance, if you are running a lead generation campaign on Facebook, you need to factor in not only the cost of the advertising but also the cost of your team, agencies, the construction of the lead magnet, the launch of the landing page, the development of the ad creative, etc. This is a better indicator of your actual ROI.

How to Make ROMI Better

So, how can your marketing ROI be increased? You can use a number of different tactics.

Prioritize Revenue

Reduce acquisition costs first. Increase CLV, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Your ROI is directly impacted by both measures. Your marketing ROI will increase if either is improved.

You must plan and evaluate the client’s journey in order to determine and optimize each touchpoint in order to achieve either of these goals.

Test and Refine

Utilize A/B testing secondarily to raise your conversion rates. You may increase conversion rates by testing out several iterations of calls-to-action, ad creative, landing pages, etc. In turn, this enables you to pinpoint the messaging and hooks that are most effective with your target market.

You can minimize your CPL, CPA, and other costs with A/B testing, which will increase your marketing ROI.

Consider Long-term Gains

Third, spend money on tactics like SEO, email marketing, and content marketing that offer a larger long-term return on investment. For instance, one of the most common strategies for increasing customer loyalty is email marketing. An average ROI for email marketing is 42:1. The research from 2019 shows that 82% of advertisers invest somewhere around 0% and 20% of their expenditures on email, which involves using online email solutions that come with built-in personalization options, like Benchmark. Although these methods involve more work up front and take longer to produce effects, the overall benefit is significantly greater. Additionally, the outcomes accumulate over time, significantly boosting your marketing ROI.

Your ROI may initially seem to be adequate if you rely too heavily on sponsored advertising, but it may suffer over the long run.

Monitor KPIs

Fourth, pay close attention to indicators that are leading and have an impact on content marketing ROI. While you cannot actually measure ROI until after a campaign (or specified time period) has ended, you can keep an eye on leading signs that are connected to ROI.

A landing page’s content may not be very beneficial to visitors if, for instance, it has a short time on the page and a high bounce rate. High acquisition costs and low conversion rates are the results of this. If you see this, you might attempt to optimize the site for a higher ROI.

Wrapping Up

For assessing the efficacy of marketing campaigns and channels, marketing ROI analysis is essential. It makes it possible for you to identify what is working, where you need to make improvements, and which tactics you should be pursuing more vehemently.

Even though calculating ROI can be challenging, it is crucial for marketers. If you do not, it will be difficult for you to justify marketing expenditures, and you risk pursuing superficial metrics that don’t help your company advance.

Utilize the data to inform your marketing selections. To continuously enhance your marketing ROI and generate large organic growth, monitor and evaluate long-term ROI and keep investing more in what is working well.