Digital Marketing for Manufacturers: How to get ROI

The only way to make money is to spend it. As a manufacturing business, one is most apprehensive to evolve with the changing shift in the marketing paradigm. With serious concerns over ROI the spends have followed the more traditional archaical route, leading upto diminishing returns. The key in the present is to create an optimum marketing mix. The industries today are all about evolution. It is about allocating your marketing budgets where your TG expects and more so towards the unexpected yet most penetrable and impressionable channel i.e. Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing ROI in the manufacturing industry is vital to understand. Your assessment needs to answer the following questions: How can you access your marketing ROI? Have you selected the right digital marketing solution? And, what are your next steps?

Map out your KPIs

Mapping out your KPIs is the holy grail to calculating your marketing ROI in the manufacturing industry. The advantage that digital marketing solutions offer is that you can easily track the metrics of your marketing activities.

Key KPIs you track: Social Media Reach, Traffic & Leads/ Sales

Make sure you avoid vanity metrics like that may make your marketing activities look good but fail to convert into sales.

Calculate your Digital Marketing ROI

Challenge to Calculate your Marketing ROI Before deep diving into how to calculate your digital marketing ROI in the manufacturing industry, it is critical to understand the challenges. While it is easy to track the expenditure of marketing, it is not easy to assess the complete cost. You will have to find answers to questions like: Do you just estimate the cost of advertising or do you include the time and effort of the team to design and create the content? What is the sales baseline and how do you measure incremental financial value? Marketing results are rarely delivered immediately. So how does your ROI include the time lag? The Marketing ROI Formula The most basic marketing ROI formula looks like this: (Revenue - Cost) / Cost (₹10,000 - ₹5,000) / ₹5,000 Multiply the result with a 100 and you will get an ROI percentage. So, what do you do if you discover that marketing ROI fails to justify the expense? There is no fixed answer to these. The only right answers to these challenges are based on your business and revenue model.

Improve your Digital Marketing Strategy

Analyze the Data

The truth of your digital marketing campaign lies in the data. Each platform has key metric points that need to be analysed. Facebook & Instagram: Reach, impressions, likes, clicks, CTR, CTA LinkedIn: Reach, impressions, likes, engagement rate, CTR Google: Impressions, CTR, CPC, Avg. Position, Quality Score By analyzing the data, you can assess whether your digital marketing campaign was a success or not. For example, a Google campaign that has: For example, a Google campaign that has: Total Cost: ₹1000 Impressions: 600 Quality Score: 4/10 CTR: 1% Means that your ad did not get the result for the amount spent. When you analyze the data, you will identify elements that went wrong with the campaign. This could be: Content that didn’t interest your audience Incorrect bidding strategy Wrong target audience Now, you can begin to fix your marketing strategy and improve the ROI.

Rethink your Sales Funnel

Every marketing action puts your customers in a sales funnel, whether it be at the awareness, evaluation, or purchase intent phase. Targeting the audience at the purchase intent phase results in a shorter sales cycle. However, this is a very niche audience group. Targeting the audience at the evaluation phase results in a longer sales cycle, but the target audience is a larger group. Rethink your sales funnel in terms of your business. manufacturing companies like Caterpillar Inc. and General Electric over the years generated sufficient thought-leadership content that ensures their customers always think of them.

Create Interesting Content

Content is king. Your marketing ROI may be low because you are creating poor-quality content. Is your content: Answering an audience question? The content you create should offer value to your audience and help answer a question. Presented in a dynamic way? Infographic, videos and images make your content dynamic and interesting. Offering an in-depth answer? Create whitepapers and thought-leadership articles that give in-depth answers. An effective content strategy creates content for your audience at all levels of their stage funnel.

Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

Any digital marketing solution that generates ROI for your business requires trial and error. There is a wide range of tools available to conduct effective marketing experiments. Google Ads allows users to set up and run Campaign Experiments. Facebook Ad Manager has an Experiments tool that allows you to easily conduct A-B testing campaigns. From HubSpot to Moz, there are many third-party tools that enhance your marketing experiments. At the end of the day, you want digital marketing solutions that give you a ‘bang for buck’. The manufacturing industry is a tough market to sell due to niche and specific needs of your customers. Whether it is boosting your social media game, running marketing advertisements, and utilizing content strategies, have a holistic approach. Incurring costs on marketing to increase sales is the perfect way to generate more revenue. However, you want to ensure that the marketing ROI in the manufacturing industry is worth the cost. Take it from the leading digital marketing agency and leverage these points to make sure you are getting the most out of your marketing strategy. Tags: Digital Marketing ROI, Digital Marketing Marketing for Manufacturers