I passionately believe that every business could benefit from having a website. However, I am concerned that 95% of business websites fail to deliver value to the business? Is yours one of them?
Just putting up a website, or opening a shop, or inventing a product, or launching a new service is no guarantee of success. It requires an effective marketing strategy and for me marketing is about solving customers' problems profitably.
There have never been so many ways to invest money on marketing and you don't have enough time, resources or money to try everything. It's not about spending more, it's about doing the right things and doing them well.
Marketing ROI (Return On Investment) should be a key component of your overall web marketing strategy. Simply, this involves measuring marketing activity and making sure that the value of the return is higher than the cost of the activity e.g. Given a choice of 5 activities, each costing a £1,000 ($2,000), which one generates the highest value to the business?
At this point if your eyes are beginning to glaze over, just think about it as getting more for less. I have no doubt that when you want to buy a new car or TV or holiday you compare alternatives and consider what you are paying and what you get for it. Marketing ROI is just applying the same principle to your business activities.
I have been evaluating Marketing ROI for over 15 years for some of Britain's biggest brands. Although, the principles are fairly simple, the application used to be complex, challenging and costly. However, there are some great tools available that make it significantly easier to do web analytics than it used to be.
For example, Google AdWord analysis includes a simple but powerful tool to measure the return on Google AdWord investment. Google Analytics takes this on to a higher level and provides data on hundreds of web metrics.
However, for some people the data is scary and they often can't see the wood for the trees. That's why many of my web marketing clients ask me to do their Marketing ROI analysis which empowers them to make wiser choices in deciding which marketing activities to invest in.
Published 21st December, 2007
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