The digital marketing landscape becomes increasingly complex with each passing year, and your business now has the ability to leverage a wide range of channels to build your brand, expand your audience reach, drive engagement and generate leads. But when your digital marketing strategy implements campaigns across numerous channels, determining which tactics drive the best results can be extremely complicated.
Measuring your return on investment (ROI) for each campaign is critical to your ability to understand which channels are delivering the greatest impact. To truly understand your ROI for multi-channel marketing strategies, you need to establish a comprehensive, data-driven framework that will simplify decision making and allow you to reallocate your budgets in real time to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
What Is Multi-Channel Marketing?
Multi-channel marketing involves using a variety of different channels to expand the ways in which you reach and interact with your audience. This can include both online and offline channels, such as:
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Paid ads
- Print media
- TV and radio ads
Combining multiple channels into a cohesive marketing strategy increases your visibility and makes it easier for your audience to connect with your brand in the place where they prefer to consume information. While each channel will typically run its own campaigns and have its own unique content, it’s critical to provide a consistent and seamless experience across all channels to build a strong brand that earns the trust of your audience.
Measuring ROI Across Multiple Channels Is Challenging
Measuring the ROI of multi-channel marketing strategies is critical to ensure you’re investing your resources in the right places, but this process can be challenging for several reasons:
- Data Fragmentation Can Create Silos – Different marketing channels and platforms typically track data in their own unique ways, and it’s common to have multiple systems where your data is stored. This fragmentation can create data silos which make it hard to accurately compare the performance of campaigns across each channel.
- Complex Customer Journeys Create Attribution Challenges – Your audience will typically interact with your brand multiple times, and through different channels, throughout the customer journey. This can make it hard to attribute a conversion to a specific channel. Simple attribution models often overvalue the first or last interaction along the customer journey, exaggerating the effectiveness of these touchpoints. Implementing a more advanced multi-touch attribution model, while critical to gain clarity regarding the performance of each channel, can be complex and expensive.
- Inconsistent Metrics and Tracking Approaches Create Inaccuracies in ROI Comparisons – Each marketing channel typically uses different KPIs, time windows and conversion definitions, which can create inconsistent comparisons of ROIs across each platform. This can result in underinvestment in channels which may actually be delivering a stronger ROI than what is initially gleaned from the data.
How to Measure the ROI of Multi-Channel Marketing Strategies and Optimize Budget Allocation
While measuring the ROI of multi-channel marketing strategies is challenging, it’s not impossible. The following process will help you evaluate the effectiveness of each campaign objectively so that you can allocate your marketing budget to the channels delivering the best impact and make real-time adjustments to these allocations as needed.
Establish Clear Objectives and Consistent KPIs
Before you can optimize your multi-channel marketing strategy, you need to establish clear objectives for your marketing efforts. Some potential goals you may have for your multi-channel marketing strategy include:
- Expanding audience reach
- Boosting brand awareness
- Increasing customer engagement
- Driving conversions and sales revenue
- Gathering data to better understand customer behavior
- Strengthening customer loyalty and lifetime value
Once you’ve defined your goals, you can identify the proper key performance indicators (KPIs) to track that will align with your specific goals. To achieve a clear understanding of your ROI, it’s important to track the same KPIs across every channel in your strategy.
Some of the potential key KPIs you can use to evaluate the ROI of your strategy include:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – The total amount of money you spend to gain a new customer. A lower CAC typically equates with a stronger ROI.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – The cost associated with having someone complete a specific action, such as filling out a form, signing up for a free trial or downloading a piece of gated content. It helps you determine the ROI of a specific action completed before someone makes a final purchase and becomes a customer.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) – The income you earn for every dollar spent on advertising. A high ROAS means your ad expenditures are delivering significant revenue, which indicates a strong ROI.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – The total revenue you can expect from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your brand. This metric helps you understand the long-term value of your customers. A higher CLV can help you justify a larger CAC and CPA since the revenue generated by these efforts will yield a strong ROI in spite of the higher costs.
Implement a Unified Tracking Framework Across All Channels
In order to effectively measure the ROI of your multi-channel marketing strategy, you need to consolidate the data from each channel into one platform. This will eliminate the silos that occur when your data from each channel remains fragmented. By implementing a unified tracking framework across all channels, you’ll be able to make more accurate comparisons when analyzing your data. This will deliver the insights you need to determine which channels and campaigns are achieving the best results so that you can allocate your budget properly.
The following process will help you develop a unified tracking framework that allows you to analyze and compare data for each channel in one platform:
- Set up consistent tracking across all channels
- Invest in advanced analytics tools that provide a centralized view of your performance metrics across all channels
- Develop systems to track the performance of offline campaigns
Set Up Consistent Tracking Across All Channels
In order to accurately measure ROI across multiple channels, you need to be able to track the source of all traffic and conversions across every channel in your strategy. To accomplish this, use:
- UTM Parameters – UTM parameters add snippets of text to the end of URLs so that you can identify where your traffic came from. This allows you to track the performance of each campaign, channel and ad in your strategy using tools such as Google Analytics to identify which ones perform the best.
- Pixels and Conversion APIs – These tools allow you to track on-site actions when people engage with your marketing campaigns:
- Pixels are tiny, invisible images or snippets of code placed on a web page, email or ad that track user behavior for your desired actions. When someone completes your desired behavior, the pixel sends data regarding this action to your analytics platform so it can be recorded for future analysis. Pixels collect data directly in the user’s browser.
- Conversion APIs bypass the user’s browser by creating a direct server-to-server connection that transmits data regarding your desired user actions directly from your backend (server) or CRM to your analytics platform.
Invest in Advanced Analytics Tools
Advanced analytics tools can provide a centralized view of your marketing performance across every channel in your strategy. They accomplish this by integrating ad platforms, web analytics and CRM/marketing automation into a central warehouse or dashboard. This eliminates data silos and allows for true cross-channel performance comparisons.
Track the Performance of Offline Campaigns
It can often be more challenging to track the performance of offline campaigns such as live events, print/radio/TV ads, direct mail and other traditional media advertising. You can use the following tactics to more effectively track the performance of your offline campaigns:
- Unique promo codes
- Dedicated landing pages
- Tracked phone numbers
Implement a Multi-Touch Attribution Model
It’s rare for someone to interact with your brand once and become a customer immediately. In most situations, people will engage in a process called the customer journey where they go through a series of interactions, called touchpoints, with your brand before they decide to make a purchase. Often, the different touchpoints along the customer journey will involve several different channels, which is why a multi-channel marketing strategy can be very effective – it provides each person with a variety of ways to interact with your brand, learn about your company, and arrive at the decision to become a customer.
But this process can make it hard to determine which channels and campaigns should receive credit for each sale since the customer had numerous touchpoints across multiple channels before making a purchase. Implementing an attribution model allows you to assign value to each touchpoint in the customer journey so that you can understand how each of your marketing channels are working together to drive conversions.
There are two primary types of attribution models:
- Single-Touch Attribution Models – These models focus on one specific step of the customer journey to determine how effective this step is at generating a sale
- Multi-Touch Attribution Models – These models evaluate each touchpoint along the customer journey to provide a more complete picture of how sales are generated
The biggest problem with single-touch attribution models is that they don’t convey the nuance necessary to truly evaluate the effectiveness of a multi-channel marketing strategy. As a result, they tend to assign too much credit to the first touch or last touch along the journey (depending on which of these touchpoints is the focus of the model).
Using a multi-touch attribution model is essential when measuring the ROI of multi-channel marketing strategies. These models allow you to determine how much influence each touchpoint had on generating the sale. This data will help you understand which channels and touchpoints along the customer journey are most effective and impactful so that you can make data-driven decisions regarding how to distribute your resources among each touchpoint and channel to maximize your ROI.
Allocate Your Marketing Budget Based on Performance
The process outlined above will provide you with the data-driven framework necessary to measure the ROI of each channel in your strategy. This information will help you determine how to properly allocate your marketing resources across each channel to achieve the greatest impact.
When allocating your marketing budget:
- Focus on high-ROI channels to maximize your results
- Maintain smaller budgets on underperforming channels you want to test and optimize for improved results
- Consider eliminating consistently low-performing channels from your overall strategy
Review Performance on a Regular Basis
The effectiveness of channels can change over time. It’s important to continuously review performance to identify trends and reallocate your resources as needed when the ROI of specific channels change. As part of this ongoing performance review:
- Conduct A/B testing of different channel budget allocations
- Analyze changes in performance and the impact on your ROI after each reallocation
Webolutions Can Help You Maximize Your ROI on Multi-Channel Marketing Strategies
Implementing a multi-channel marketing strategy is essential in today’s competitive digital landscape. By leveraging a wide range of channels in your strategy, you’ll be able to increase your visibility among your target audience by giving them an opportunity to engage with your brand where they consume information. But optimizing your multi-channel marketing strategy requires an ability to accurately calculate the ROI on each channel you include in your plan. At Webolutions, we provide the data-driven marketing services you need to understand your ROI and allocate your budget to the channels that will deliver maximum impact.
Webolutions has been Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994, and we have over 30 years of experience transforming brands from visible to dominant. We take a collaborative approach that helps us understand your business to ensure our recommended strategy aligns with your goals and delivers the ROI necessary to achieve your desired revenue growth.
We’ve developed a unique Collaborative Marketing ROI Projection Model™ that gives your leadership team a clear, data-driven way to decide where your marketing dollars will have the greatest impact. We combine industry benchmarks with your actual performance data – close rates, average sale value, profit margins and lifetime customer value – to project the ROI of every potential channel and campaign used in your marketing strategy. This enables us to evaluate all relevant marketing channels (online and offline) to identify which ones will deliver the strongest return. The end result is a focused, strategic plan that shows exactly how your marketing investments can drive measurable growth.
We also provide a tracking system to monitor progress and make any real-time adjustments necessary to optimize results. Our proprietary True Attribution™ ROI System gives you a clear picture of what’s actually driving results. Instead of relying on “last touch” attribution tracking, which often hides the real sources of success, we use a more complete, UTM-based approach that shows the full path a prospect takes from first click to conversion. This gives you accurate insights into which marketing efforts are truly working, so you can be confident you’re allocating your budget correctly.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.
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