Figuring out your return on investment (ROI)
The biggest flaw that businesses face is understanding the return on investment (ROI) of their digital marketing. Some of the challenges include:
- Too much focus on vanity metrics (E.g. Focussing on metrics that don’t matter as much such as impressions and clicks)
- Not having their tracking set up correctly (Tracking events such as “visitor hits to a page” as a converted lead)
- No understanding their actual goals (what do you actually want from your digital marketing? More sales? More leads? More brand awareness?)
- Not being able to track the full journey of a lead from enquiry through to sale
- Not having the right technology or partners to implement your reporting
A CRM fulfills a large part of the reporting puzzle. Google analytics can help you track your ROI on anonymous leads such as visitor sessions, most popular pages and conversions. However a CRM will take this reporting further as it tracks the activity of every “known” lead.
A CRM is able to report on:
- The exact source of a known lead (E.g. “John Smith” lead came from Google Ad XYZ)
- The exact source of a known sale (E.g. “Mary Jacobs” came from Facebook Ad 123)
- Track the full journey of a lead from enquiry to sale including their activities in between (understanding the activities that resulted in the sale)
- Actual sales $ resulting from digital marketing activities. Because you can track sales in your CRM, you can accurately see the ROI of your digital marketing.
Together with Google analytics (anonymous tracking), a CRM completes the full reporting picture by tracking known leads.