Business owners are faced with the challenge of competing in a very active and potentially productive online market. This challenge has many factors that come into play, but one of the most commonly discussed, yet misunderstood, is online marketing return on investment. This is often referred to as ROI as the term applies broadly to any return on an investment.
Return on investment is a pretty simple concept to understand. As a basic example, let’s say you invest $1000 and receive $1500 in return. In a very simple world, the ROI and profit is $500. In business, this math isn’t as simple, but it isn’t difficult to understand either.
When it comes to online marketing, there are several ways you can determine if your investment is profitable. But before that, let’s take a look at what online marketing actually constitutes: in actual fact, online marketing is anything online that represents your business, this includes but is not limited to: website, landing pages, advertisements, social media posts, directory listings, etc.
Based on these above online marketing examples, every industry has different ways that work to effectively achieve online marketing ROI. For example, dentists and auto mechanics will generally have a different marketing position and technologies they will use to promote their services. This is not to say these industries can’t share the same successful methods of promotion either!
It should also be understood that marketing and promotion are two different things when it comes to online presence. Marketing is how you position yourself against your competition or other similar industries, and promotion is the action of running advertising campaigns online (free or paid). So you can see there are two primary parts of a successful online marketing campaign.
Essentially, you need to ensure your marketing is correct (are you effectively communicating to the customers you are trying to attract) and then carrying out the action of putting your marketing, services and products in front of those potential consumers, or make it easy to find you online.
It’s pretty simple to see that understanding your marketing and promotion is very important in predicting and determining your business growth by clients or customers. And it can sometimes be confusing to understand what works and what is a total waste of investment.
Unfortunately, most business owners don’t have the personal time or resources or time to learn completely how the internet works, so they generally refer to help. But it’s important to understand that help with online marketing is like any other industry, you typically get what you pay for. Don’t expect gold for pennies.
Summary points:
- Know the brand, marketing and promotion strengths of your industry.
- Keep tight tabs on your return on investment (ROI), use real numbers and analytics
- Disregard the volume of investment, and stick strictly to ROI.
- Receive a complimentary online marketing evaluation, get it here.
There is help. To solve the problem of understanding online marketing return on investment, we provide a complimentary and comprehensive online marketing evaluation. With the use of Google and proprietary research tools, we can properly analyze and break down the most successful avenues of investment of any industry and in particular, your business.