Investors and organizational leaders have a tendency to want a financial return on the money they invest in a company, especially when it’s spent on often-ethereal activities like marketing. They want to see how the marketing team turns their financial investment into real dollars and company profit. This means you must measure the impact of your marketing campaigns if you want to show how your marketing spend directly contributed to sales.
You’re probably nodding your head like, “Well obviously. But if it were that easy wouldn’t we all be doing it BUT HOW!?”
It’s a valid question.
Only 43 percent of marketers report confidence in their ability to tie tangible results and ROI back to specific content marketing tactics.
If this scenario sounds familiar, we’ve got a few ROI reporting basics to share, which should help get a little closer to effectively demonstrating marketing’s value to stakeholders.
Challenges for gyms in measuring marketing ROI
Reaching the point where your beautiful report presentation is wowing investors who can clearly see the the gym’s marketing ROI going through the roof requires overcoming a few obstacles. Success means not only knowing how various touch points and interactions in the marketing funnel impact a prospective buyer’s eventual purchase decision, but why, and what you can do to change the outcomes.
Here are a few common challenges in getting there:
Choosing an Attribution Model
The ROI story you tell changes depending on which attribution model you use.
For example, a health club that measures only last touch attribution might wrongly assume top-of-funnel blog content isn’t returning much investment on the cost of its production if the last touch before purchase was conversion on a bottom-of-the-funnel offer to waive initiation fees.
You’d have to be looking at a first touch attribution model to see that the lead first came in contact with the brand while reading a top-of-funnel blog post.
Looking at multiple attribution models can be especially helpful in proving social media ROI, which often serves to create a positive brand impression and awareness long before a potential lead ever converts.
What Should We Track and Measure?
Measuring ROI for a campaign becomes significantly easier when the marketing team has a pre-defined strategy and SMART goals.
Until these two items are outlined in detail, knowing which KPIs to track and what results you want to see will be a challenge.
The first step is determining SMART goals. This means identifying what you hope to accomplish, and when you hope to be at the finish line.
Once you know where you’re headed, it’s easier to create a roadmap (strategy) for how you plan to get there.
Here’s an example:
A goal to increase the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) by 10% in the next 60 days might call for an increase in the production and promotion of gated content designed to drive website visitors to fill out a form and download an offer.
Once your team has goals and strategy outlined you can determine which marketing metrics you’ll track to measure success.
Presenting ROI to your investors
The challenges don’t end when you finally figure out what to track and why you’re tracking it. Now you‘ll have to take the mountain of data you’ve collected and turn it into a report that tells a story. This means translating the data to dollars and cents.
The only way to connect the dots from marketing to the dollars it generates is to ensure marketing automation tools communicate seamlessly with your CRM. The best solution is an all-in-one marketing automation and CRM that supports clear communication and sales enablement for closed-loop reporting and maximum cross-department communication and collaboration.
Bonus points if the reports are easy to read and create.
Hubspot is an effective and affordable marketing and sales platform for solution for health clubs and gyms. It seamlessly marries marketing, sales, and reporting together to clearly show the relationship between marketing’s hard work, and improvements in the company’s bottom line.
As you prepare your presentation, think about what matters most to the investors, which will probably relate to revenue, retention, and new membership sales.
Make these the highlight of your show.
Lead with the bottom line, then tie in how your marketing efforts had a direct impact on revenue and growth numbers.
Proving the marketing department isn’t just a cost center can be a struggle. But implementing tracking systems and carefully considering goals and strategy will help draw a straight line from your efforts to any increase in profits, proving to stakeholders that marketing is clearly a revenue-enabling department.
