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What is the return on investment for this campaign?
It’s a common question you hear from clients of your marketing agency. They want to be sure that their money is being spent wisely.
It can be challenging to prove the value of your agency. Twenty-eight percent of small and medium businesses claim to have no visibility into how their agency partners spend their budgets. The reason for working with an external agency is “generating a good ROI.”
It’s not necessary to guess when it comes to proving ROI. Proving the value of multichannel strategies will become second nature by tracking campaigns effectively across promotional channels, providing clear and accurate attribution using the right marketing tools, managing client expectations consistently, and checking in with them regularly.
Why Multichannel Marketing Muddles the ROI Waters
61% of marketing leaders admitted they were not confident with their ROI data.
Recent years, however, have seen the puzzle become more complex as multichannel marketing has gained traction. Although combining marketing and communication channels is effective, it can be difficult to prove ROI.
The complexity of marketing campaigns has increased
Many marketers and agencies used to rely on a “last click” attribution model where the last, non-direct contact with a client is given credit for the conversion.
This is no longer true in the multichannel world of today. The customer journey is a jumble of different interactions and exposures.
Your client may have a paid advertisement on Facebook. A customer could click through and visit the website. A few days later, they might opt-in to an email offer after seeing an Instagram post. After receiving an email, they might decide to take action and call the number for more information.
Why should the email announcement take all the credit for conversion when other marketing channels and activities push the customer to the finish line? One of the most difficult challenges in multichannel ROI is how to do multichannel correctly.
More options for customers and faulty memories
Many businesses ask, “How did you hear about us?” to better understand their customers’ sources. When it comes to multichannel advertising, customers’ answers to this question can be misleading.
Why? Customers who have had several interactions with a company may not remember the first time they heard of it. Was it a Google paid ad, or stumbled upon a blog post? Did they stumble across a blog? A friend may have mentioned it. Which came first?
When asked, customers often give in to the “Economy of effort” concept. This means they choose the easiest or most direct answer, saving time and energy. This gives businesses and agencies inaccurate data on how customers got to their websites, making it harder to prove ROI for various channels or even entire campaigns.
Analytics are not Unified
Data, data, and more are the key to effective marketing today. The number of data available to agencies is more significant than ever. But simply having this information doesn’t mean you can use it to make decisions and prove your value to clients.
29% say that they dislike working with external agencies because they lack the analytics necessary to support their value propositions. According to Gartner, only 54% of marketers believe that data is a factor in their marketing decisions.
Where are we going wrong? Why aren’t you using the analytics?
It’s not a lack of accessibility or unification but rather a lack of integration. The average marketer uses twelve tools. To support data-driven campaigns, marketers use an average of 12 tools (yikes!)
It’s time-consuming and cumbersome to get the analytics you need. And most importantly, it is prone to errors and misattribution.
Tips to Help Agency Clients Prove Multichannel ROI
The inevitable ROI question regarding multichannel marketing may be enough to cause you to put your head on your desk.
Some good news: you can show your agency clients the ROI of multichannel marketing campaigns if you take the appropriate steps.
Establish clear goals and targets. You and your agency client need to agree on the purposes of a campaign to show a solid ROI.
Together, decide with your clients the goals for your marketing efforts. These could include:
Brand awareness
Increase customer engagement
Remove barriers or address objections
Drive sales or signups
Multichannel marketing is not the only way to do this. You need to set goals with your clients to work effectively. What is the success of this marketing campaign?
It can be helpful to break down your goals for multichannel marketing. You may have a general plan (e.g., build brand awareness for CompanyXYZ), as well as specific goals and metrics that you will use for each channel (e.g., get 2,000 email subscribers).
This will allow you to check that the pieces of your multichannel puzzle are performing as expected. You can then make any adjustments necessary.
Establish Clear Attribution Models
Multichannel attribution does not have to be overwhelming or complex if you use the right tools.
You need to see the entire customer journey, including all touchpoints. Not just the final conversion.
CallRail is a powerful tool that helps agencies show their value to clients.
Tracking Calls Source tracking and multichannel lead attribution allows your agency to better understand the buyer’s journey and interactions.
Call Tracking, Combined with Form Tracking, can help to connect online and offline touch points during the buyer’s journey. You can track all interactions in one place, from clicking on ads to downloading content to making calls.
Convergence Intelligence: In phone conversations, helpful feedback on multichannel marketing campaigns may be missed. CallRail Conversation Intelligence allows you to transcribe and analyze your calls using AI.
Understanding multichannel analytics should not be confusing. It shouldn’t require pulling data from different tools and exporting it. CallRail is a unified solution that makes the attribution process easier for your agency and clients.
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