What everyone ought to know about ROI

ROI or Return on investment is used to help measure whether your marketing dollars are being spent wisely. Everything you do in terms of marketing your business can and should be tracked whether you’re spending money or even more important, your time.

Each ad you place, online or off, commercial you have run, article you send out, or social media mention can be tracked to see how much sales and revenue it brought in verses how much money it cost to produce and run.

Ways you can track:

Have a special number that they need to call into. Most businesses that have a telephone system in place can assign a specific extension to the ad so that any calls that come in from that specific advertising that will flag it as coming from that advertising method. If you don’t have a fancy telephone system, get a free phone number from Google Voice. You can even set up a special voicemail message for the ad. I have 3 numbers that I use so I can track where leads come from.

Have a unique web page (landing page) or domain name set up for them to visit. You can easily create a page dedicated to your offer. If you have a content management system you can do it yourself or you can have your web designer/developer create one for you. Optionally, domain names are so inexpensive you can purchase one specifically related to your offer that you can used to set up a landing page or redirect people to a specific page on your web site. Equally important to this method is to have statistics tracking set up on the site and pages. A great free one that I also use is Google Analytics. (I’m sure you’ve noticed by now I lean towards using Google tools as they are very good as well as free!)

Create a special package only available through the offer you’re advertising. When your prospects contact you regarding this special package, you’ll know they found you via that media.

Have the buyer reference a special code when ordering or contacting you. For example: “Get 3 rugs cleaned for the price of 2, just mention code “3 rugs” when calling in to schedule your visit.”

When you start implementing these tracking methods you’ll be able to narrow down the top ways that bring in the most bang for the buck in regards to your time and money. Because, if you’re like me and have limited resources, you’ll want to narrow down and only continue the top methods that bring in the best results.

Bonus tip: Remember to only use one method at a time to really narrow down your results. For example, don’t send the same offer out via a newspaper ad and in a facebook post unless you also include different codes the prospect can mention or can call into a specific number in order to differentiate between where the responses came in from.