Many business owners must admit that the Internet has become the driving force behind increasing ROI (Return on Investment). Although many businesses have had to rely on traditional marketing efforts to generate sales years ago, now some 15 years later, digital, or Internet marketing strategies are the lifeblood of most marketing and sales techniques. In fact, without them, many businesses will fail.

Although traditional marketing strategies still play a great part in generating sales, to fully maximize your ROI, a digital marketing campaign is needed to keep your marketing pipeline filled with potential candidates. As a result, it’s important to determine which digital or Internet marketing strategies are necessary to generate the maximum ROI.

Some Initial Facts to Consider Before Identifying ROI

There are several things that need to be measured before you can determine if you’re generating a ROI. For example, you should determine if the goals that you set are being reached and are ultimately resulting in an increased ROI. This could include areas such as:

• Building trust
• Building brand awareness
• Building credibility
• Building customer loyalty
• Building customer engagement

Many Internet marketing techniques have been put into place to generate results in the areas indicated above. Each of these areas may not directly or immediately result in an increase in ROI, but should eventually. Therefore, it’s important that all of these factors are taken into consideration.

Evaluating Monetary and Time Investment: The amount of time and money invested must also be evaluated to determine if a ROI was reached.  The fact of the matter is that there are financial investments as well as an investment of time that goes into different marketing strategies. In either case, each must be measured in a way that will best reflect ROI.

Measuring Long-term Versus Short-Term ROI: Business owners should also consider the fact that some returns on investment are generated faster than others. Certain marketing strategies will not realize results until after the course of several years. And it’s usually these long-term investments that will pay off in greater returns than the shorter term investments.

However, there should be methods put in place to at least monitor whether or not your Internet marketing strategy is headed in the right direction and determine the likelihood of it yielding adequate returns.

Comparing Apples to Apples: Business owners should take into consideration that each industry is different and will achieve different results when implementing a certain Internet marketing strategy. That’s because certain demographics are more responsive to online marketing strategies than others. For example, industries that target seniors over the age of 62 may not get the kind of response from companies whose demographics are between the age of 15 and 25. This demographic tends to be more Internet savvy and can be found hanging out on and surfing the net more so than those in a higher age bracket. Thus, learning other factors such as how your specific target market makes purchasing decisions is also an important factor to consider when implementing digital marketing strategies.

How Various Marketing Strategies Impacts ROI

The following are some of the more widely used online marketing strategies along with their impact on generating ROI.

Social Media Marketing

Determining the ROI from Social Media Marketing requires a little bit more effort than some of the other areas, such as direct advertising or SEO Marketing Strategies. When implementing Social Media Marketing strategies, areas such as traffic generation, customer engagements, and conversions may be easier to measure than other areas that are associated with this strategy, such as branding, and the overall value that has been added to your company’s reputation.

Email Marketing

Determining the ROI from email marketing is pretty straightforward. It actually generates one of the highest ROI among most other marketing strategies. Approximately 67% of businesses researched indicated that email marketing is one of their highest sales funnels. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the cost of generating an email campaign is a lot lower than the cost associated with some of the other marketing strategies that generate a higher ROI.

One of the initial costs associated with implementing an email marketing campaign is building the email list. This must be done earlier in the game in order for the campaign to work. Other than that, once the list is built a lot of the sales are based on economies of scale, making it a great avenue for generating high ROI.

SEO and Content Marketing

Content and SEO Marketing requires a great deal of an investment of one’s time and very little to no monetary investment. However, if implemented properly, you will notice that the true power associated with Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing is its ability to grow exponentially over time.  Every piece of content you publish on the internet will add long lasting value for your business in terms of website traffic and domain authority.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Although Pay Per Click (PPC) is considered a good marketing strategy for generating substantial ROI, there are other factors that must be considered to acquire a better picture of the impact of paid advertising.  For example, many companies may find that the conversion rate is substantially lower than the click through rate, which is primarily due to the fact that many tire kickers also click on paid advertisements, reducing the overall ROI.

Overall, it’s actually somewhat difficult to determine which of these strategies is actually the best for your business.  They all have the potential to yield some form of ROI. However, the strategies that are proven successful over time include Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing. The success of these strategies rests in their ability to have an effect on multiple areas, adding a long-lasting permanent value, that will eventually, yield compounded returns.