by Roger Janik, an EO Houston member and CEO of Fair Marketing

Every business relies on marketing to grow, but accurately measuring that growth in order to gauge results is an ongoing challenge for most business owners. The good news is that taking the guesswork out of marketing ROI—especially when it comes to online—is possible. After much agony and years of testing, I’ve created a goal-oriented method of defining and quantifying a business’s internet-marketing goals. Getting there … well, that was the tricky part.

My marketing firm has grown exponentially in the past decade, affording me valuable discoveries along the way. One of the most profound had to do with client retention. Specifically, a pattern among clients who’ve left dissatisfied. Even though we had developed a standard of transparency and accountability, some clients insisted they simply didn’t “feel” results. It was frustrating. We knew we were producing—and measurably so—but that didn’t always matter. Our efforts to track every lead and demonstrate value just didn’t translate to the level of satisfaction required. So, I set out to discover a fool-proof retention strategy, one that could lasso even the jumpiest of clients.

Along the way, I learned that the core of our client attrition issue was a discrepancy between our goals and our clients’ goals. Or perhaps more importantly, I found a lack of clearly defined goals on the clients’ end to begin with. A lot of clients simply knew they wanted to do “better,” without ever defining what better was. From this, it was clear that a one-size-fits-all marketing solution could never work, and that to effectively tailor our efforts to meet our clients’ goals, we first needed to define them. That’s where my formula for determining true marketing ROI begins.

Step One: Identify Your Online Goals
Begin by defining your current performance baselines— consider the following questions: What is your monthly online revenue goal? How much website traffic do you currently receive each month? How many website leads are generated by your website each month? How many of these leads convert to actual paying customers each month? What is the average dollar worth of one new customer? How much are you currently spending on digital marketing?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can determine how many more web visitors, leads and sales you would need to hit your online-revenue goal (use this tool: www.fairmarketing.com/roi-calculator). This discovery was a major eye-opener for us. Why? Because if we knew how many website visitors we needed to drive to our website, we could create a custom internet-marketing strategy to capture those new visitors. How would we go about doing that?

Step Two: Craft a Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve defined your goals, you’ll need to determine the number of organic impressions it would take to equal actual website visitors. For example, if you used the calculator mentioned earlier, it may tell you that you need 50,000 organic impressions to convert 5,000 new website visitors. How do you capture those 50,000 impressions? Get ranked on page one of Google for your keyword phrases. To find the targeted keyword phrases that support your goal of earning 50,000 impressions, use this tool: https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner.

Step Three: Measure Goals and ROI
When using metrics-reporting tools, you’ll need to evaluate and adjust your marketing efforts to determine if goals are being met. Once enough time has been allowed for sufficient analysis and report generation, you’ll be able to track results against the baseline goals defined in step one. Here are some tools to help you do that: website visitor tracking (www.google.com/analytics); leads/sales tracking (www.keymetric.net); keyword discovery (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner); and keyword rankings (www.myseotool.com).

By following these three steps, we now have clearly defined goals, keyword targets to hit those goals and tools to quantify results for clients, all of which has greatly reduced client attrition. The only ingredient that’s missing is the marketing plan needed to push your site to page one of Google. That conversation is about SEO, and is a much longer discussion. With this information at your finger tips, I hope you can learn from my experiences and find similar value!

Roger Janik (pictured) is the Community Outreach Chair for EO Houston, and believes in putting family first above all. Contact Roger at [email protected]