Get The Best Bang For Your Marketing Buck

By Martin Murray
CEO, Interactive Return

Two questions that all marketers must continually address are: where do I invest my marketing spend in order to achieve the optimal return on investment and what is the return on investment.

Increasingly, the answer to the first question is 'online'. The answer to the second question can be determined to the nearest cent. The reasons for moving your marketing spend online are compelling:

1. Effectiveness: The World Wide Web and email are interactive media that allow you to engage your target audience in a richer experience. Whether your objectives are lead generation, sales, promotion, event management, customer surveying or subscriber acquisition, an appropriately designed and excuted online marketing campaign will deliver better results than campaigns conducted in any other medium, bar none.
2. Value for Money: Unit costs for making contact with prospects or customers, lead generation and customer acquisition are a fraction of the costs incurred in other media.
3. Choice of Channels: The online marketing mix has expanded to include search engine marketing, email marketing, empathy marketing, affinity marketing, affiliate marketing and more. Each channel has different traits in terms of permission, interactivity, immediacy, responsiveness and cost. Choosing the right online marketing mix to suit your needs will contribute to the success of your campaign.
4. Measurability: This is where online marketing is unrivalled. The old adage that "I know half of my advertising budget is wasted but I don't know which half", is eliminated when using online media. Every facet of an online marketing campaign is measurable. In the case of an email marketing campaign it is possible to know if the email was received, if it was opened, which articles in the email the recipient read, if the recipient clicked through to the website, which pages on the website were read, if a purchase was completed, what was purchased and for how much?

Determining the Return on Investment is a matter of arithmetic, not of conjecture. Recent experience shows that advertisers are embracing the medium more quickly than most advertising agencies and are demanding the inclusion of online elements in any campaign. Because of the superior performance of online marketng spend, once an advertiser experiments with online media they will then move an increasing proportion of their total online spend to online channels.

Back to February's Newsletter