Identify your marketing bargains

In every company, there are going to be marketing bargains – programs that offer incredible ROI. The problem we often have as marketers is that we’re focused on paying attention to the biggest and loudest – the programs that bring in the largest number of leads, even if they’re woefully inefficient.

With the advent of Google’s Cost Data tools, you can now upload custom click data from other programs and the cost of those clicks into Google Analytics. Run a press release? As long as you’ve used campaign tracking, you can upload your costs to those analytics campaigns. Running ads on a different PPC network (like Facebook ads)? Grab your campaign spend and upload it into Google Analytics.

If you want to simplify things even further, make yourself a spreadsheet and start lining up your programs very simply. Here’s an example using SEO and email in a Google Doc.

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to look down a list of ROI percentages and identify which programs are performing at their peak. The big question is, can the bargains scale up? In the example above, if you put $1 into SEO, you get it back plus$ 5.94 more. If you put $10 into the machine,$ 59.44 comes back. That’s a prime candidate to see if $20 returns$ 118.88. Keep adding money into that box until the ROI diminishes below your next most efficient program.

As you wrap up for the year, look at a comprehensive list of your marketing programs and identify the bargains, the programs with the highest ROI, even if they don’t necessarily have the highest lead generation numbers. You might find that some programs are worth investing far more in than you’re currently doing, and some programs that you might be able to afford to throttle back on if their lead volumes can be replaced by more efficient sources.

Bonus: download a copy of this spreadsheet for your own use by clicking here.