Measuring Return on
Investment for Marketing Dollars

Regardless of what type of marketing program your company is running, you should keep track of where your marketing dollars are going and what type of return on investment they are producing.

In the past, tying marketing dollars to advertising campaigns was always a challenge. Your best bet was direct mail, 800 numbers or qualification codes listed in different advertising messages. However, the Internet has made many things much easier to track. By placing unique URLs in advertising, press releases, direct mail and other marketing materials, it is easy to see what types of marketing programs are generating awareness for your products and services.

Using programs like Google's Analytics program, you can track marketing campaigns to numerous variables from hits to a single web page all the way to the conversion rates for sales of certain product lines. Of course, your products need to be sold on line to track sales results. If you don’t sell products online now, you should seriously consider doing so. It will provide your company with the ability to sell products to customers worldwide 24 hours a day.

The best one-two punch in the marketing world is combining an informative, search engine optimized website, with a strategic public relations initiative. Build your website correctly and customers worldwide will be able to find you in about 2-4 weeks time. While waiting on the search engines to index your site, issue well designed press releases with the same search engine optimization as your website and hundreds of news sites will automatically find your news and feed it onto their news magazine sites. As more and more websites provide links back to your website, your placement in top 10 of the search engine results will continue to rise.

Since we are a PR firm and focus primarily on publicity, we like to measure our success in black and white ink. If you are spending $10,000 a month on public relations, we should be generating at least $10,000 of editorial coverage per month in editorial ink.

If a publication charges $10,000 per page for advertising and we get you one full page article, then we are breaking even. However, if we generate several articles per month in numerous publications, then you are getting a great return on your investment and we can actual show you the proven results.

All customers, at some point in time, should be asked how they became aware of your company’s products and services. Knowing how and where they saw your message will allow you to expand or contract marketing budgets based on the return on investment the company is receiving.