How to Increase Marketing ROI: 6 Strategies for Success

Everyone with a marketing budget wants the same thing: to get the most bang for their buck. The bigger return on investment (ROI), the better. At PowerChord, we work with a lot of clients looking specifically to increase marketing ROI. We’ve identified six key strategies that can help you boost the rewards you get from your marketing efforts, no matter where you’re at.

To understand those strategies, it’s important to first break down exactly what marketing ROI is and what it looks like for your particular business. Let’s take a closer look.

Breaking Down Marketing ROI

The principle of return on investment is simple–it helps us understand how the money, time, and resources we spend on a project or effort lead to quantifiable results. When a marketing initiative brings in new clients or sales, that's ROI. Having a high or low marketing ROI depends on how profitable the initiative was, which depends directly on how many clients or sales it produced.

Evaluating the hard data of financial results, good or bad, is critical to understanding and improving this key metric. 

Marketing ROI For Multi-Location Businesses

For businesses with multiple locations, calculating and implementing marketing data across various initiatives can grow exponentially more complex. Fortunately, digital marketing technology (martech) solutions like PowerChord can be leveraged to keep things unified and organized. 

Marketing campaigns that bring huge returns in one location can often differ from those that succeed in another. To get the biggest marketing ROI possible with multiple locations, having a rock-solid marketing team or martech partner to accurately track and report this data makes a massive difference. 

6 Ways to Increase Marketing ROI

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing that will always lead to great results. Likewise, there is no single strategy or framework that’s guaranteed to help your marketing campaigns become more effective.

Instead, the best way to increase marketing ROI is by adopting a specific strategy that’s tailored to your needs and goals. If you’re not seeing as many conversions after a digital advertising campaign as you’d like, for example, your strategy for improving ROI in the future might involve leveraging different channels.

While there might not be a blanket solution, there are some fundamental strategies that can benefit almost any marketer looking to improve ROI. Here are some of the essentials:

1. Define KPIs & Metrics that Matter

It’s easy to get lost in a swirl of key performance indicators (KPIs) and marketing metrics that don’t actually relate to your business’s needs and goals. To know what KPIs and metrics are important to focus on, you need to establish your specific objectives.  

For example, if you want to maximize client acquisition or sales, pay special attention to these metrics:

• Marketing efficiency ratio (MER). This number is your sales revenue divided by your marketing expenditure for a specific period of time. 

• Cost per acquisition (CPA). This number indicates the cost of acquiring a single client. 

• Conversion rate. This number will be the percentage of sales leads or website traffic that actually converted. 

• Customer lifetime value. This number will be the revenue value a client is worth during their entire time as a customer. 

2. Establish a Clear Plan

When we say a clear plan, we don’t just mean for a new ad campaign. We mean you need a clear roadmap of all of the following:

• How will you track and calculate your marketing ROI data?
• How will you report that data to evaluate the success of current and new initiatives?
• How will you leverage that data to improve your marketing campaigns and ROI over time? 

3. Gather and Analyze Marketing Data

Once you have a solid plan in place, the important work really begins. Gathering and leveraging marketing data along the entire sales funnel ensures you know exactly what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t, sooner rather than later. 

A classic example of this is using A/B testing. By running two versions of the same ad or email campaign, featuring different visual elements or marketing copy, you can track and determine which version leads to higher ROI and use it exclusively going forward. 

4. Prioritize Effective Marketing Channels

Like with A/B testing, it’s hugely helpful to test and monitor various marketing channels to find your path to higher ROI. Usually, a mix of different channels will be most effective, and depending on your business, that mix will vary. 

In 2024, B2B brands gained the most marketing ROI from:

1. Websites, blogs, and SEO efforts
2. Paid social media content
3. Social media shopping tools

Meanwhile, B2C brands found the most success in:

1. Email marketing
2. Paid social media content
3. Content marketing

5. Repurpose Pre-Existing Content

Waste not, want not, and this applies to old content you’ve published on your site. Oftentimes, old content can be reused or re-optimized to gain new, long-term traffic. 

You might: 

• Pull bits from old blogs to post on socials.
• Optimize your SEO for more locations.
• Chop longer videos into shorter, snappier reels.
• Try out new visual elements on previously successful copy.

Content repurposing can fuel performance gains without big budgets.

6. Leverage Martech Solutions

Regardless of the industry you’re in, a martech solution can take the headache out of increasing ROI. Leveraging technology like what PowerChord offers can help you make data-driven decisions with real-time reporting and insights. Automation in your marketing pipeline can boost your productivity and profitability by personalizing customer engagement and streamlining routine tasks. 

When marketing resources are slim or your overhead is overbearing, martech can provide the efficiency you need. 

Increase the ROI of Your Marketing Efforts with Purpose-Built Tech

Having the right partner by your side can bring all six of our strategies within easy reach for your business. Whether you’re B2B, B2C, multi-location, or just starting your first brick-and-mortar, PowerChord’s martech suite of tailored tools will help you optimize and unify your customer experience. 

Our purpose-built tech offers best-in-class marketing data and reporting that can make the most of your budget, no matter how tight. 

Improvement takes time, but it can start today. Come and chat with us to see how PowerChord could help you reach your marketing ROI goals sooner rather than later.