The goal of every business is to get more money back than what they invest, but that’s easier said than done — even with inbound marketing.
ROI keeps your business growing and your budget intact, so it’s crucial to have a plan that helps it increase.
We’ve come up with a few inbound marketing strategies that can help your business flourish by increasing your ROI.
Understanding inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is the process of attracting visitors to your business when they’re interested in buying from you. It targets potential customers precisely and tracks your success, and you can do it on a modest budget.
Inbound marketing includes the following techniques:
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of improving your website so search engines can crawl and index your content to show up in search results.
SEO is so important because it helps your website appear in search results and rank well. In doing so, you can target your audience as they’re searching for your business.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is one of the best ways to promote your business.
It’s the process of creating profiles on websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for your company. Not only can social media reach millions of users every day, but it also lets you interact with your customers by answering questions they may have or responding to comments.
Email marketing
Email marketing is the process of asking your site visitors for their contact information, adding them to mailing lists, and sending them information right to their inboxes.
You can use emails to share special content, company news, discount offers, and more.
Blogging
Blogging is a great way to attract traffic to your website.
Blogs provide information to your customers and improve your site’s SEO by letting you rank for new keywords in search engines. Blogs are easy to share with your audience too, and they show your audience that you’re a knowledgeable authority in your industry.
Infographics
Infographics are a great way to take a lot of numeric, quantitative information and turn it into an engaging visualization. They’re perfect for link building because they condense lots of information and may go viral on social media.
Webinars
Webinars let you present information to invited attendees on a live platform.
This connects you to an exclusive list of viewers, and you can interact through live Q and A sessions after you’ve finished your presentation.
Guides
Guides let you share your wealth of knowledge with your users.
Typically, guides also work as a great way to gain email addresses. Ask for contact information so that you can send the free guide, and you’ll also gain a new address to contact in your email marketing campaign.
Unlike the above strategies, traditional marketing sends untargeted marketing blasts into the public with unverifiable results with no real target audience. It’s also costly to promote.
This kind of marketing includes techniques such as television commercials and billboards.
When you’re looking to increase your ROI, inbound marketing is the best way to market. It allows you to choose your target audience so you’re already selling your product to your most qualified audience, and you can track your results with pinpoint accuracy.
Budgeting importance
To calculate and understand your ROI, you first have to know your budget.
Without a budget, your spending can easily exceed your return — especially if you’re using more than one platform.
First, you should decide what platforms you want to use and then decide how much you’ll spend to reach your audience on each platform.
It’s better to identify “safe” investments first so you can earn a reliable source of returns. Afterward, you can look at higher-risk investments.
When you decide how to invest, calculate a sample ROI using an estimate of the lowest possible gain. Then, you can decide how much to invest to ensure your ROI is positive.
After your first marketing attempt, track which platforms have the highest ROI and drop any that don’t work.
Then, you can increase your budget for the platforms that being the highest ROI and decrease your budget for those that don’t.
Understanding ROI
ROI, or return on investment, is a ratio that shows the success of an investment.
In order to have a positive ROI, the money you earn must be higher than the amount that you invested in any inbound marketing platform.
To calculate ROI, you need to know your initial investment and the revenue you earned from that investment.
The resulting ratio or percentage is your ROI.
It’s easy to understand why you want a positive ROI — it means you’re investing your money properly and making more than what you invested.
An example of positive ROI would be if you invested $200 in Facebook ads and gained three customers that earned $2000 in profit over the course of your campaign.
In order to calculate that ROI, you would fill in the equation like this:
In this case, you’ve made a $9 for every $1 you invested or 900% ROI.
You can calculate ROI for each advertising platform individually or all together. It may be helpful to first calculate each individually to see just how much you get with a specific platform. This can help you decide which kinds of advertising to continue and which to end.
Tracking importance
Tracking ROI is extremely important to the financial well-being of your business. If you fail to track your ROI, you’ll likely spend more money than what’s allotted for your marketing budget.
In order to calculate correct figures, wait until the end of a marketing campaign so that you know exactly how much you spent and how much you made — giving you in an accurate ROI.
Do you want to increase your inbound marketing ROI?
We have all the knowledge and tools to improve your ROI. If you want to earn more from inbound marketing, we’re here to help!
Contact us today for a free quote!