BUSINESS ANALYSIS AND ROI

 If you’re tracking monetary return on investment (ROI) as the sole criterion to determine if your marketing programs are working, then you need to catch up to the 21st century because you’re missing a big part of the picture. No longer does ROI stand only for return on investment. Today, ROI also stands for return on impression, which encompasses two primary values — a hard metric and a soft metric. Together, those two values are far more powerful for measuring marketing performance than the single dollar value provided by return on investment metrics.

But the new ROI of marketing goes even further than investments and impressions. It also encompasses return on engagement, objectives, and opportunity. Today, people share information via the social web faster and more frequently than ever. Traditional ROI analysis is just the tip of the iceberg. The really interesting part of the story is what happens beneath the surface of the water. The hard metrics related to return on investment barely touch the surface.

1. Return on Impression = Eyeballs: The first metric you can track using the return on impression valuation is the number of people who actually see your ad, marketing material, or other tangible marketing piece.

2. Return on Impression – Perceptions: Remember, companies don’t build brands, consumers do by experiencing those brands, developing feelings for those brands and emotional connections to them, and talking about those brands with other people. Thanks to the social web, those conversations are far-reaching. Therefore, a marketing initiative performance analysis would be incomplete without analyzing how that initiative affected consumer perceptions of the brand.

3. Return on Opportunity: Measuring return on opportunity requires you to evaluate the opportunity that a specific marketing initiative presents versus the time and monetary commitment that effort requires.

4. Return on Engagement: Remember, relationship brands are the most powerful brands in the world. Return on engagement can show you how well you’re brand is performing in terms of building and sustaining relationships with both consumers and influencers. The soft metrics data related to how and why people engage with you and your brand are extremely valuable to companies that prioritize them.

5. Return on Objectives

Analyzing return on objectives requires that you accept that not all goals are measurable with hard data. Sometimes, marketing efforts simply help a business move in the right direction to meet its long-term objectives. Return on objectives goes hand-in-hand with return on opportunity and return on engagement to give you a comprehensive, integrated marketing plan and tracking strategy that delivers the best results.

Together, return on impression, return on opportunity, return on engagement, and return on objectives give you a clearer picture of how your marketing initiatives are performing than return on investment offers alone. Today, focusing on traditional ROI only isn’t enough. The hard and soft data is available to you, use it. You can bet your competitors are (or will be soon).

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