How to Measure the ROI of Your Manufacturing Marketing Efforts

How to Measure the ROI of Your Manufacturing Marketing Efforts

A person measuring ROI using a tablet.

By Michael James, Guest Blogger

If you’re a manufacturer that markets products and services to the construction, industrial, or manufacturing markets, you must know how much your marketing efforts are paying off. That being said, measuring the return on investment (ROI) for each individual effort can be difficult. However, with the right approach, it’s possible. In this article, we’ll discuss how to measure the ROI of your manufacturing marketing efforts to help you make better decisions about your marketing spending and strategies. More accurately, we’ll cover creative ways to measure different types of engagement. This will help you ensure that every penny counts towards achieving the best outcomes possible.

1 Understand the Basics of Return on Investment (ROI)

A return on investment is anything that brings you a return after an initial investment. More often than not, this is a monetary return, but not always. That being said, one of the most important things for any business is figuring out the ROI. If you know what you are investing into and why, you can maximize efficiency and bottom line. When it comes to manufacturing marketing efforts, as with all marketing efforts, your goal should be to maximize returns while minimizing expenditures. Using metrics like time spent or money saved will help you gauge whether you are on the right track to success or failure. As a result, you’ll be able to make decisions quickly and efficiently.

2 Identify Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Identifying key performance indicators is essential to measure the ROI of your manufacturing marketing efforts accurately. Your KPIs can help you set goals and measure progress. They can also help you prioritize tasks, increase productivity, and improve customer satisfaction. It can be challenging to figure out which KPIs are relevant for your type of business. This can be especially difficult for manufacturing marketing efforts since it requires specific marketing. However, no matter the type of business, the same principles hold. You need to establish processes that incorporate feedback systems when meeting particular objectives. This will ensure that you accomplish all your tasks thoroughly and efficiently. Additionally, with the data you gather, you will have all the information necessary to make informed decisions that yield results.

3 Analyze the ROI of Different Types of Manufacturing Marketing Efforts

When it comes to marketing efforts in the manufacturing industry, many different options are available. It can be challenging to determine which ones will yield the best ROI. This is where analyzing different types of ROI becomes essential. Understanding how each strategy affects your bottom line lets you decide which methods make sense for you. This is the best course of action if you wish to figure out how to allocate resources accordingly. Doing this is going to allow you to get a complete understanding of the efficacy of your marketing initiatives.

4 Make Use of Software Solutions to Track Your Campaigns

Automation and software solutions make the process of tracking campaigns easier and faster. Not only that, but they free up valuable time to focus on other business processes. By taking advantage of automation, companies in the construction, industrial, and manufacturing markets can get real-time information to track the effectiveness of their campaigns. This data help with making more informed decisions on optimizing their efforts to maximize ROI. Additionally, automation can help identify growth opportunities.

Furthermore, it can show areas where campaigns need tweaking or improvement. Keeping an eye on the performance of your campaigns using software will even give you a competitive edge in your market. That being said, CRM is the best software to use for this purpose. If you can make the most of your CRM, you won’t have issues staying on top of your ROIs.

5 Utilize Data Analytics to Identify Areas for Improvement

By utilizing data analytics, manufacturers can gain greater insight into their customers. Furthermore, they can identify areas in need of improvement. Data analytics allow a manufacturer to compare customer feedback over time. This, in turn, makes it possible for them to detect any changes that may warrant attention. Combing data analysis with target research will also help you recognize customer trends. This is important because staying on top of the changes in your industry will help you adapt quickly and accurately. This assessment of customer preferences allows companies to remain agile and respond to customer demand in a timely manner. As a result, this is going to increase customer satisfaction.

Additionally, harnessing the power of data-driven decision-making can significantly improve multiple aspects of the business. For instance, by leveraging advanced analytics tools and techniques, you can better understand your whole operation and figure out how to improve them.

6 Develop Strategies to Maximize Your ROI

Maximizing your company’s ROI is the key to sustainable growth and profitability. However, you need to understand how to structure your investments across different advertising platforms to achieve this. And, for this to work, you need to create a strategy. When creating a strategy, you must be careful because what’s on paper may not be so cut and dry when you put it into practice. For this reason, you must regularly monitor metrics such as sales volume and cost efficiency to ensure they work in practice. If you don’t do this, there is no way to ensure success.

Conclusion

In order to effectively measure the ROI of your manufacturing marketing efforts, first and foremost, it’s important to understand your ROI. In addition, identifying KPIs can help to ensure accuracy when it comes to the data you collect. Furthermore, software solutions like CRM can help streamline the process. So, following these steps will increase the likelihood that you will hit the right targets with your next marketing effort. Not only that, but you will also be able to accurately measure the ROI and make any improvements if at all necessary.

About the Author

Michael James is a seasoned marketing professional with years of experience in the manufacturing industry. He has developed a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities of marketing products. In his free time, Michael loves spending time hiking and surfing.

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Webcast: Mobile Marketing

Our vision architect, Matt Sonnhalter, will be presenting on CFE Media’s webcast, “Mobile Marketing: What Impression Are You Making and How Will You Measure It?”

Matt, along with Kim Dushinski author of The Mobile Marketing Handbook, will discuss how B2B marketers can make a good mobile impression. Whether you’re ready for mobile, or not, it’s here. If you have a website, you’re already being viewed on mobile devices.

Join Matt on Tuesday, June 19 at 2 PM EST for this free, informative presentation. You can register here.

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Webinar: Increase Sales with Effective Lead Management

For those of you who are constantly trying to measure ROI on your Advertising/Marketing budgets, things fall short when you can’t say for sure what happened to all those leads you turned over to the sales force. We’re having a free webinar on September 14th at 2 PM EST and you can sign up here.

Here are some highlights:

  • Most companies let new business opportunities slip through their fingers… and don’t know it!
  • Recent studies found that some 80% of website visitor inquiries are ignored. Earlier studies found that 67% of inquirers are real prospects, yet 72% never hear from a salesperson. 
  • In this webinar, you will learn how to maximize the sales opportunities in every lead and maximize the return on your marketing investment.
  • Learn how to follow-up on all leads quickly, affordably and effectively, how to improve follow-up effectiveness in the field, and how to implement easy-to-use tools to measure results.

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B-to-B Marketers: Is There a Way to Track Social Media?

Social media isn’t like other traditional methods of marketing like direct mail or e-mail campaigns. These have set objectives and ways to track response mechanisms to check open and response rates.

Social media, on the other hand because of the nature of the beast, doesn’t have those types of metrics in place. Social media isn’t like other traditional methods of marketing like direct mail or e-mail campaigns…and please don’t do it because everyone else is!

Thomas McMahon in a recent post, 7 considerations for tracking social media success, outlines some great suggestions on how you may want to evaluate your social media tracking.

Here are some highlights:

  • Quality over Quantity – The only really important numbers are the ones that are following you that are truly engaged and interested in what you’re saying.
  • Hearing vs. Listening – You need to realize that not everyone is always hearing you. You want to connect with your listeners and hopefully get them engaged.
  • Participate and Engage – Social media is about involved. You just can’t post articles…you need to participate in conversations.
  • Be Where Your Action Is – Define your niche market and then find out where like-minded people hang out. Those are the forums, blogs and communities you need to be active in.

Remember, social media is a long-term investment with no short-term ROI. Be patient, build your network and trust within your target audience and social will pay off in the long run.

What other considerations should be on this list? I’d love to hear from you.

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Why Do People Ignore Social Media Metrics?

If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

One of the main reasons folks should use social is, for the most part, easily trackable and you can see quickly your success/failure rates. I’m amazed when asking people who are using social tools how are they doing, they come back to me with some generalized statements like, “I’m doing really well.” If I press them for more details, I come to find out that they really don’t have a plan for measuring what they do and the time they spend at it. Metrics are an important component for the use of social media. Especially measuring for ROI in regards to the amount of time that must be invested. You would think this would be a no brainer. But according to a recent a survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, a whopping 84% of professionals do not measure ROI for social media. It appears that hardly anyone is taking the time to measure the ROI for social.

Social Media ROI

Some additional insightful statistics from this survey:

  • 86% of respondents to the survey of professionals from a variety of industries said they had adopted social technologies.
  • 57% said they were using social media tools for marketing.
  • More than four in 10 respondents did not even know whether the social tools they were using had ROI measurement capabilities.
  • 3 in 10 reported using social media for customer service and support.

Click Here to download a copy of this report.

Here’s another post you might find interesting: How Do You Measure Social Media?

A great resource of social media articles and fresh reports comes from eMarketer. I found the original source of this survey through their eMarketer Daily Newsletter. I highly recommend it.

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