One of the biggest challenges companies and marketers face is measuring the ROI of their marketing campaigns and efforts. It is easy to track data on actions such as site traffic, contacts, and actual sales, but determining which marketing tactic will lead to such actions can be difficult. By using marketing automation software, you can link your sales with marketing campaigns and determine which campaigns are performing and which are falling short.
If you haven’t adopted marketing automation yet, how are you currently measuring the success of your marketing campaigns? Website traffic and website contacts are always beneficial, but it is difficult to determine where exactly this traffic is coming from and how the users got to your site. Similarly, looking at impressions, clicks, and CTRs on a digital campaign can determine how successfully the campaign is running, but without connecting this information to sales, you can’t truly gauge your ROI.
How are you tracking all your measures of success? Are you personally asking your clients how they found you and keeping track of their responses in an Excel document? The issue that arises with this method is the disconnect between marketing and sales: the process is not streamlined or organized. Similarly, using CRM software or Google Analytics can create a disconnect between marketing costs and sales.
Bridging the Gap
Marketing is the generation of advertising material to support sales; sales refers to the interactions you have with clients. Marketing and sales need to be integrated for the business to be successful and grow. Sharing data between the marketing and sales departments can help streamline the marketing effort, and it can provide the sales department with the tools and information it needs to make the sale. The use of marketing automation does just that.
Attributing Sales to Marketing Campaigns
When you use marketing automation software, you can track sale numbers and apply them to the known marketing campaign cost, ensuring a direct and accurate measure of ROI. Below are the ways marketing automation helps you determine your correct ROI.
Email Analytics
By creating email campaigns within the platform, you can track clicks, opens, bounces, and deliveries to optimize your campaign. You also can see your visitors’ activity on your website after they have clicked on the email. This gives great insight into how well the email campaign is performing and which emails lead to sales.
Campaign Tracking
Through campaign tracking, you can automatically track your website visitors’ conversions from the moment they first visit your site all the way through the final sale, even if that sale is months later. This allows you to see what marketing tactic, if any, brought them to your site and to attribute that sale to the appropriate marketing cost.
Behavior Tracking
Tracking a visitor’s behavior is easy with marketing automation. You can see which content a potential lead is engaging with and immediately have a touchpoint with which to communicate with that visitor. Behavior tracking makes lead nurturing easy and effective because you can reach the customer at the exact time they need to be reached. All interactions are organized and tracked in the marketing automation platform, making it easy to see what steps, tactics, and costs led to a sale, ensuring an accurate ROI.
Ocreative is a Gold-Level Certified Agency Partner with SharpSpring, a marketing automation platform with powerful marketing and sales management capabilities—see our certification. SharpSpring’s suite of tools empowers sales and marketing professionals to drive more leads, convert more of those leads into sales, and optimize their ROI.
Request a Demo and Learn More
If this is the first time you’ve been introduced to marketing automation, it is about time you came onboard! If you’ve heard of marketing automation before or are looking to explore Ocreative as your agency partner, contact us; we will be happy to give you more information. We can set up a thirty-minute demonstration on how the marketing automation software and processes work, and we will follow that up with a fifteen-minute question-and-answer session.
For more information, visit our Marketing Automation page or our article on Lead Generation with Marketing Automation for more details and to watch our Marketing Automation video.
About Ocreative
Ocreative began its business in 2003 as one of the early pioneers of digital advertising and design in the Midwest. The company is made up of bright, honest digital innovators and creative gurus, carving out a niche for themselves and their trusting clients. Along the way, Ocreative grew to become more recognized as an award-winning, full-service, integrated marketing agency. And, Ocreative gets big results for its clients, and that puts big smiles on everyone’s faces. Even though the agency’s office is in the Midwest, its clients are located throughout the United States. Ocreative’s portfolio includes expert marketing and strategy, advertising and design, websites and digital marketing, video and multimedia.
