Blog Post

Demand Generation

Growth

How to Track the ROI on Your Growth Marketing Campaign

How to Track the ROI on Your Growth Marketing Campaign

The Next&Co Digital Media Wastage Report shows that 41% of the average company's marketing budget is wasted, with wastage being the highest among ecommerce, retail, and finance companies. 

Calculating your Return On Investment (ROI) is perhaps the most important thing you can do to keep your growth marketing spending on track. Knowing your ROI will help you:

  • Make value-conscious choices
  • Prove the value of your marketing to leadership
  • Justify your marketing budget for next year 
  • Choose which marketing channels to invest in 

This article will show you how to calculate your growth marketing ROI step-by-step.

Step #1. Set Up Ways To Track Your Marketing Success

You can't calculate marketing ROI without knowing what "return" you are getting. So the first step is to set up ways to track your marketing successes. 

Common ways to monitor your digital marketing campaigns include:

  • Google Search Console. Google Search Console helps you monitor your website's performance in search results. 
  • UTM links. You can use UTM codes to track how your website visitors browse on Google Analytics. 
  • Facebook Pixel. Facebook Pixel will help you track conversions from Facebook ads.
  • Social media marketing analytics platforms. Platforms like Buffer Analyze, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Zoho Social can help you analyze your social media marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). 
  • Ecommerce analytics tools. Platforms like Hotjar, Kissmetrics, and Optimizely can help you analyze ecommerce KPIs. 
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools. CRM tools like HubSpot, Salesforce CRM, SAP CRM, and ZOHO CRM can help you analyze customer interactions.

It's best to set up these tools before you start publishing your marketing efforts.

Step #2. Gather Data

Next, sit back and start gathering data. It's best to monitor your marketing for several weeks or months if possible, as a longer data collection period will ensure your results aren't skewed by outliers.

Step #3. Calculate Your Marketing Costs

Then, calculate your costs. 

You'll need to take two types of costs into account:

  1. Direct costs

Direct costs are expenses that have a clear price tag and can be directly tied to your marketing and sales funnel. Marketing software, Paid-Per-Click (PPC) ad spending, equipment, marketing staff salaries, and freelancers are all direct costs. 

  1. Indirect costs

Indirect costs are expenses that aren't directly tied to your marketing but are still essential to make running the marketing department possible. Rent, electricity, and salaries from non-marketing staff (like receptionists or administrators) are all indirect costs. 

You may need to consult your accounting department to figure out your indirect costs. Once you have your figure, add it to your direct cost figure to get your total marketing spend. 

Step #4. Calculate Your Marking Returns

Now it's time to calculate your marketing returns, and there are several approaches you could take here. 

If you want to simplify things, you could take your entire net income figure for a given period and attribute 100% of it to marketing. 

Or, if you want to be more precise, you can go through your marketing channels one-by-one and calculate how much revenue your company earned as a result of it. This is easier with some channels than others. Some ad analytics, paid media, and referral marketing tools, for example, will help you calculate how much revenue your brand earned from ads. Sales from search engine marketing, social media marketing and content marketing, on the other hand, are harder to attribute. 

Whatever method you choose, you should finish this stage with a clear figure.

Step #5. Execute the ROI Formula 

The final step in measuring digital marketing ROI is executing the following ROI formula:

ROI = (marketing revenue - cost of marketing) / cost of marketing

For example, if your total revenue figure was $45,400 and your total marketing costs were $12,300, your ROI would be 2.69.

If your ROI figure doesn't look right, make sure you have only included marketing returns and costs from a single, clearly defined period (like quarter one or 2022, for example). A common mistake marketers make is including a year's worth of an expense rather than just the cost in a set period. 

Other KPIs to Watch with Growth Marketing 

  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) = average order value x purchase frequency rate x average customer lifetime
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) = (cost of sales - cost of marketing) / number of new customers acquired
  • Conversion rate = (total conversions / total visitors) x 100
  • Cost-Per-Click (CPC) = total amount spent / total clicks
  • Open Rate  = (number of emails opened / number of messages sent) x 100
  • Average Transaction Value (ALV) = total sales / number of transactions

Tracking other KPIs and presenting them alongside your marketing ROI can give the ROI figure more context. It can also help you explain fluctuations in your ROI across multiple periods. 

Calculating Marketing ROI, Growth Marketing, and Matter Made

Measuring marketing ROI will help you quantify your growth marketing efforts, build a strong PLG funnel, and analyze your digital marketing campaign efficiently. Naturally, knowing your marketing ROI can help your growth marketing strategy succeed long-term.

Want to embrace growth marketing but don't know where to start? Let's talk. 

Blog Post

Growth

Demand Generation

Blog Post

5 Reasons You Should Hire a Growth Marketing Agency

Google Trends data shows that searches for "growth marketing" have grown substantially over the past five years. This isn't too surprising — growth marketing is highly scalable, provides a strong Return On Investment (ROI), and helps brands grow sustainably long-term. 

Mastering growth marketing isn't always easy, so many companies choose to work with a growth marketing agency. This article will shed light on five reasons your brand should hire such an agency. 

#1. They Have Experience With Other Companies at Your Growth Stage

As brands grow, they often face a common set of growing pains related to marketing. For example, startups often lack the marketing bandwidth to run full-fledged campaigns on all digital platforms simultaneously. Or, new ecommerce businesses often struggle to get the engagement snowball rolling (getting your fifth follower is far easier than getting your 150th). 

Growth marketing agencies work with brands over long periods, so they know how to minimize growing pains and steer a brand through the chaos. 

Growth hackers have also implemented a wide range of strategies across many digital platforms, so they know what works and what doesn't. This knowledge is invaluable, as it will help you make smarter marketing choices straight away so you can yield returns quickly. 

Note: Read "How To Build a PLG Funnel Your Sales Team Can Use."

#2. They Can Plan Industry-Specific Long-Term Strategies

Compared to regular marketers, growth marketers view the sales funnel more holistically. Plus, they focus on metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and retention rate over short-term revenue. 

The growth marketing sales funnel stages: awareness, consideration, action, adoption, and expansion and their corresponding lifecycle stages.

As a result, growth marketing strategies are like snowballs — they grow as they gain momentum. Growth marketing is really a long-term approach. 

While a traditional marketing agency can help you design a strategy weeks to months in advance, your growth team will think months to years ahead. Naturally, they can help you design marketing that is sustainable and provides long-term returns. 

Growth hackers are also excellent researchers. They can dive deep into your industry and learn what motivates your customers and how to market to them best. When you hire a growth marketing team, you get a holistic, industry-specific plan. 

#3. They Can Save You Money

The initial investment of hiring a growth hacking marketing agency often makes brand owners and managers nervous. However, if the brand invests wisely, it can spend less on an agency than it would if it tried to run a fully-fledged marketing strategy in-house. 

Growth marketing agencies can also get brands a better ROI. Agencies have a lot of in-house expertise, so they can optimize your marketing budget with smart investments and reduce marketing wastage. 

Research on 1,000 marketers by Rakuten Marketing shows that around 26% of marketing budgets were wasted in 2018, while a 2022 report on 41 companies spending $500,000 to $31 million on marketing estimates marketing wastage is 41%. So wastage is a major concern for many brands. 

#4. They Reduce Your Workload

Growth marketing agencies often employ marketers who specialize in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid media, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, referral marketing, video marketing, and other marketing niches. So, when you work with an agency, you get access to experts without having to expand your in-house marketing team. 

Working with a growth marketing company can also reduce your workload substantially. Marketers can either complete marketing tasks for you or help you automate them. 

You'll know whether you've hired a good agency if they're easy to work with. We recommend looking for an agency that communicates well, provides regular updates, consults you in the decision-making process, and works transparently. 

#5. They Can Help You Become Results-Driven

Growth marketing is generally more adaptive than traditional digital marketing (though that is changing as marketers get better access to marketing data). When they implement a strategy, growth hackers conduct frequent tests and experiments to assess how your audience is responding. Then, they optimize your marketing materials to obtain the best result. 

Naturally, hiring an agency can help you become more results and performance-driven. Performance marketing offers benefits like:

  • Higher ROI
  • More efficient marketing
  • Optimized campaign planning
  • Enhanced forecasting 
  • Faster speed to lead times
  • Greater customer retention

Working with a growth hacking consulting agency also means you don't need to design your marketing analytics infrastructure alone. Many new brands and startups with limited staff and busy schedules often struggle to dedicate time to building this infrastructure, so it's nice to get it off your to-do list.

Note: Read "3 RevOps HubSpot Automations Your Business Needs."

Performance Marketing and Growth Marketing Agencies

Growth marketing can improve your ROI, grow your customer base, and help you achieve rapid and sustainable growth. 

You can see the value of a growth agency by looking at a case study like that of Allocations. Matter Made helped Allocations develop marketing infrastructure and run campaigns on Google, Bing, and LinkedIn. As a result, Allocations increased its pipeline three times in the first 90 days

Want results from growth marketing? Let's talk. 

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