ROI Report In Digital Marketing & SEO

The point of digital marketing is not to generate more traffic to your websites.  It’s purpose is to generate more leads.

Visitors that don’t fill out an enquiry form, or contact you by any other method, shows your content marketing strategies are not working.

And what about when your sales team don’t even get in contact with the best leads?  The efforts you made into the content creation become worthless.

The bottom line is this: are you getting the value for money from your current strategies or not?

Measuring the ROI from your marketing campaigns is becoming a far more important part of the sales funnel than ever before.

Understanding ROI

Before going any further, it’s important to know what your businesses’ goals are.  You must be able to clearly define what you are trying to get from all of your content marketing strategies.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are essential for defining these goals are:

1. Organic traffic and leads
2. Conversions and conversion rates
3. Referrals and PPC

Your goals may change as your business develops but with every KPI, they need to be measured and recorded.

It’s what you do with this information that enables you to calculate your ROI.

Prioritise your efforts in business areas that require the most attention.  The easier and quicker you solve these, the more effective your content marketing becomes.

Your ROI Report

Check out this step-by-step marketing funnel, from Hubspot.  It’s a really easy method to follow to turn a visitor into a customer.

It is a four step process:

Step 4, ‘Delight’, is pretty self explanatory and is where we are all aiming to get to.

But let’s break down each of the other steps to see how you should be constructing your ROI reports.

Attract

Attracting visitors falls within the SEO scope.  Effective on page optimisation and technical SEO is how potential customers will find your website in the SERPs.

The KPIs you need to be measuring at this part in the funnel should focus on organic traffic.  Your ROI reports should show how your webpages and content marketing is ranking in the SERPS and how much traffic they are generating.

Organic traffic is not a goal; it’s a measurement to determine how many leads you are generating, which is the goal.

High quality content is a sure fire way to get the audience you need to your website.  The better the quality, the more authority you have in the field, boosting organic traffic.

Another part of the Attract step is tracking keywords.  You must be able to track your position for the most competitive keywords or your rankings will slip.

We have built an effective content strategy template, customised to each business individually.

Convert

Conversions are one of the three core KPIs you must be tracking.

Conversions rates are essential for every website as it’s the quickest way to increase overall profitability and top line revenue of a company.

You may have created really good content but they become pointless if they don’t convert into sales.  A good ROI report will take this into consideration.

ROI reports are great for looking at conversion rate optimisation because you can track how well your website performs.

Your reports should be looking to collect information on how your visitors turn into conversions.  Two of the most popular and effective methods are opt-in email participators and of course, the people who fill out your enquiry forms.

If people are not signing up, you’re not going to see any results in the near future.

However, once you start getting a good flow of leads into the system, you can make sure this continues.  If there is large drop off in leads, you can easily go back and find out what changed.

If we look at the email opt-in list as an example, if for some reason participation falls, it would be worth looking at how you are interacting with the list.

It could also be something to do with any website updates you have implemented.  Little changes can make a big difference.

Clients of HQ SEO receive a full conversion rate optimisation audit and recommendations report based on several best practices.

Close

Arguably, the hardest part of the entire sales funnel to master.

ROI reports shows if you are meeting regular targets and keeping you on track to meet them.

Ensure your sales team are updating their progress frequently to get useful data.  An ROI report should give you indicators about where your sales team are doing well.

However, the best information will come from looking at metrics that show where you or your sales team are faltering and can be improved.

For example, if you analyse the report and see your team aren’t doing too well at closing deals over the phone, you can send them on a course to improve these skills.

If you have the data, use it.

ROI Reports Help Make Data Driven Decisions

Each of the three parts in generating effective ROI reports will help you better understand how and where to improve on business performance.

The more data you have, the more reliable your results will be.  Reliable information provides data driven results.

You will be able to use your time at a much more effective rate.  Focus on how to develop your ROI to improve your business marketing campaigns.