21 Ways Certified Digital Marketers Can Increase ROI

The investment in training your marketing personnel to become more effective Digital Marketers really pays off. It creates ROI in a number of key areas in any company within any sector. Business owners who leverage the skill of a trained Digital Marketer who understands not only digital marketing but also the technology needed to run effective campaigns will see benefits in 21 different areas.

#1: Set Realistic Budgets That Drive Success Without Wasting Money

To achieve customer growth and brand-building awareness, companies must invest in digital marketing. However, Digital Marketing professionals can develop goals and strategies to use every dollar appropriately, getting more for every dollar spent on marketing for your company.

They do this in several ways.

• Digital marketers first determine the target audience most likely to buy,
• They then use digital marketing methods to reach that audience in the most effective way possible, and
• Finally, they optimize results by analyzing their efforts.

#2: Conduct Annual Evaluations of Marketing and Sales Processes

Digital Marketers boost ROI by conducting thorough annual evaluations of all marketing and sales processes, methods, and tools being used so adjustments can occur as needed.

They ensure that all marketing efforts directly align with the company’s business goals, its brand, and its marketing strategy.

Additionally, they evaluate the marketing organization itself to determine:

• How the business is making money
• Where it is looking to grow
• If there are any pain points limiting that growth

They evaluate marketing processes to find gaps and areas of opportunity, asking themselves, “Can we do more with what we have?”

Digital Marketers access the marketing outcomes occurring to ensure they are creating the desired business results that are directly linked to their efforts.

#3: Invest in Integrated Marketing and Sales Technology

The investment in integrated marketing and sales technology saves companies money because it automates many of the labor-intensive processes your employees are doing right now, including your marketers.

Your employees use this technology to also provide actionable intelligence, real data that can be used to achieve new goals.

Numerous marketing and sales technology options exist, but a Digital Marketing professional needs a marketing automation platform that includes:

• Website Content Management Systems
• Search Engine Optimization
• Marketing Automation
• Email Marketing
• Social Media Publishing and Monitoring
• Sales templates and tracking
• CRM
• Advanced Analytics
• Lead Qualifying
• Forecasting
• Web/Video Conferencing
• Call Tracking and Recording
• Meeting Scheduling

#4: Integrate Marketing and Sales Processes

By integrating marketing and sales processes, it is possible to see several aspects of growth within your company. It helps create a coherent buyer’s journey, builds credibility with a single, clear message, and helps to align both your sales and marketing goals to complement and support each other.

By integrating these aspects, it is also possible to see better budgeting and tracking of efforts and improved efficiencies throughout your operation.

In many ways, integrating your marketing and sales processes:

• Helps your team work more efficiently
• Reduces overlaps in costs
• Reduces costs that don’t align with your goals
• Produces better results

#5: Acquire Customer Feedback Early on in the Buyer’s Journey

Your Digital Marketing pro will also work to align customer feedback on the marketing and sales process, leading up to becoming a customer.

Customer feedback is gold – it allows you to get insight into what people think and believe early on, so you can then tailor your efforts to be more streamlined and efficient, therefore improving the customer’s buying journey.

It costs as much as 25 times more money to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Additionally, existing happy customers can be a strong source of referral leads, and referrals are more likely to convert into paying customers.

#6: Develop an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

An effective digital marketing strategy is one that can attract and convert your ideal buyers.

Your strategy must include:

• SMART goals
• Research
• Inbound marketing efforts
• Paid media activities
• A clearly defined ideal buyer

There are many components to the strategy, but to be effective, it must produce leads and then convert those leads into buying customers.

This process includes building buyer personas and identifying goals. It means determining which marketing tools will be used, evaluating and improving digital channels, and then planning paid media campaigns.

This may also include components of:

• Search engine optimization
• Email marketing
• Viral marketing
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing

Once he or she develops a strategy, they need to test and ensure it is effective by seeing an increase in paying customers.

#7: Implement an Inbound Marketing and Sales Methodology

Inbound marketing – which focuses on attracting prospective buyers to your website, blog, and social media – must work alongside your sales strategies.

Your Digital Marketing expert can do that by building content and resources that help to bring people to you so your sales team can then work with highly targeted leads and turn them into buying customers.

The inbound marketing component attracts customers to your company and brand, moving them through Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages.

Inbound sales teams must then move the customer through the Identify, Connect, Explore and Advise components of the buyer’s journey.

#8: Train and Certify the Sales Team on Digital and Social Selling

You, as the manager or business owner, recognize the importance of digital and social selling, but your sales team hasn’t been trained or educated on the process.

Most often, sales teams have very little experience in the hands-on components of digital marketing, and yet it is rapidly becoming one of the most important ways for you to reach customers.

Your Digital Marketing professional can help guide your sales team. However, it’s best to also invest in Social Selling Training for your salespeople so they fully understand how to sell in the new digital age of selling.

#9: Take a Digital Marketing Diagnostic Test to Evaluate Skills

As noted in #8, most sales professionals have limited or high-level digital and social selling skills. This may be true of your marketing team as well.

If you are unsure of the digital skill level of your marketing and sales team, then have them take a quick digital marketing diagnostic test. This allows for a better understanding of what skillsets your team already has, and which need more training.

#10: Train and Certify Your Marketing Team

Determine whether your team members need advance digital training.

The goal here is to ensure every member of your marketing team has the most effective digital marketing knowledge, and understands effective strategy and tactics to perform their jobs at the highest level possible.

The more efficient and skilled these individuals are, the less time they will spend on marketing tasks and the more effective their work is.

Even if you believe you have a highly-trained team of professionals, they may be lacking in the most modern and advanced digital skills.

#11: Ensure Your Marketing Team is Effective at Project Management

How much money does your company spend on the tasks your marketing team performs?

One of the key ways your Digital Marketer boosts your ROI is by making sure that the marketing team is capable of, and mindful of, those costs.

By improving the team’s project management skills and productivity levels, it can make each marketing campaign less costly and more effective.

A component of project management is tracking time and expenses that relate to various marketing and sales resources. By doing this, the team can track your cost-per-lead and cost-per-sale more thoroughly and accurately.

As a result, you have clear information to use to make better decisions going forward.

#12: Create and Publish Digital Content

Your marketing team needs content to publish and a Digital Marketing professional can create and publish that content or manage the person who does.

This is more than just writing a piece of content for a blog. It’s about developing content based on what your customers are most likely to respond to and developing those concepts from research.

This may include content for your website, but it also includes blog material, social media material, and videos.

All of this content – each piece individually and as a whole – must work to educate and engage with your target audience. The more effective it is at doing this, the better the ROI on that piece of content, as well as on the marketing campaign as a whole.

#13: Become a Thought Leader in Your Industry

What is the value of being a thought leader within your industry? There’s no doubt this takes a lot of time and work, but it pays off in better ROI every time.

Thought leadership improves your company’s publicity, fueling PR opportunities for your company.

As an expert, more news professionals, influencers, and bloggers interact with your Marketer. They directly contribute to and improve your company’s, and your brand’s, credibility and trust.

In addition, thought leaders create more effective content. Because of this, they can remain at the top of the industry – always creating new ideas and opportunities for your business.

#14: Develop Buyer Personas to Reach the Most Profitable Customers

To make any marketing campaign successful, it is critical to understand who the ideal buyer is. Your Digital Marketer will develop buyer personas that identify not just a potential customer, but the most profitable customers.

This allows your company to determine where it needs to focus its time. It also helps to guide product development within your business and aligns your organization from top to bottom.

A well-crafted, research-based buyer persona not only tells you who is going to buy, but how to reach them, therefore ensuring every dollar spent is going towards attracting these buyers.

#15: Consider Creating Compensation Bonus Plans

Companies are accustomed to compensation plans for salespeople but consider setting one up for your Digital Marketers as well. You’ll need to set it up according to your applicable business methods and goals.

What’s unique is that you can base your bonus plans on the cost of sales objectives. There are plenty of commission methods possible today, but those based on the cost of sales objectives offer a better ROI for your organization.

#16: Implement Conversion Optimization Strategy and Tracking

Your conversion rate optimization efforts also need to have a clearly defined strategy that is then tracked for effectiveness. The conversion is the action that you hope your website visitor takes – signing up, buying, submitting a quote, or otherwise.

When your visitor takes that action, you can then begin to optimize the process. This is called conversion rate optimization.

It’s the testing of various methods to get more people to convert into customers.

The Digital Marketing Professional working for your company can perform these tests, assess their results, track their benefit, and make adjustments.

This may include A/B testing, calls to action, and the conversion path.

The goal is to find the best formula for turning your visitors into buyers.

That’s not necessarily an easy or straightforward process, as it takes:

• Developing a strategy that uses data-driven information
• A hypothesis
• Creating a plan for testing
• Working to improve it over time

#17: Implement Account-Based Marketing for B2B Businesses

If your business is after high-value customers such as B2B companies, an account-based marketing approach may be the ideal option, especially when compared to traditional sales and marketing efforts.

This form of marketing offers more personalization, which is why it can work very well. But it tends to be more difficult and more expensive to pull off successfully especially if your team doesn’t have advanced digital marketing skills

Yet, it provides a clear improvement of ROI when used successfully.

Because it is personalized and optimized for your business, it offers stronger messages and better communication opportunities. It also helps to reduce resource waste, allowing your marketing programs to run more efficiently.

Your Digital Marketing Professional will be able to implement this type of marketing for B2B businesses and then track goals, measure results, and make adjustments to further improve ROI.

#18: Implement Online Ordering and Sales Processing

To be clear, the traditional salesperson’s role is fading. Do-it-yourself online ordering is clearly the favored option by today’s consumers.

Whereas in the past a salesperson could talk to the buyer, sell the product, and win the purchase, now all of your digital efforts have to facilitate this.

It’s important to recognize that it’s not just the functionality of online ordering that’s important to provide, but also a sales process that helps the buyer become educated on their own, so they will buy.

Self-educating buyers look for products and services online and need clear, detailed information that encourages them to buy without leaving the web page.

The average e-commerce website often fails to complete the selling component of the online transaction. If your buyers hit your website, but don’t take action, that could be a clue that you need improvement here.

The Digital Marketer’s job will be to put in place an effective online ordering and sales process that streamlines these efforts.

#19: Focus Sales Team’s Activities on the Most Qualified Leads

Previously we mentioned the importance and value of creating buyer personas. Another component of the Digital Marketer’s job, then, is to focus the sales team on those types of qualified leads.

The leads tied to your buyer personas are the most likely to be profitable in the direct sales follow-up. They are ready to move down into the sales funnel.

Why are these leads specifically valuable? No matter how many names are in your database, it’s essential to put your sales team’s attention (and your money invested in that team) on the leads most likely to become a customer.

These are the deals they can close. Your Digital Marketing Professional should be able to focus your sales team’s efforts on these specific leads, boosting your ROI.

#20: Implement Feedback Mechanisms

Feedback, as noted previously, is quite valuable throughout the buyer’s journey.

Another task for your Digital Marketing Professional is to put in place a feedback mechanism or tool that is multi-faceted.

That is, it needs to be implemented for your customers (those who buy from you) but also for your key contacts that are lost in some aspect of the sales funnel. For those that are lost in the funnel, the feedback will help communicate to your marketing and sales team where this potential customer has become stuck and provide feedback on how to get them unstuck.

Gathering this data allows you to potentially avoid losing future contacts due to lack of feedback.

#21: Focus on Client Retention and Provide Feedback to Marketing and Sales

Client retention is another key aspect of Digital Marketing. After the sale, it’s about building customer loyalty, so they become repeat buyers.

However, it is also very important for building your brand and increasing referrals.

With the customer feedback in hand, your marketing and sales teams can be better able to adjust their efforts to make better use out of every lead. It’s the job of the company’s Digital Marketing professionals to ensure this is streamlined from start to finish.

Summary

With this insight into the job and the skill the Digital Marketing Professional can bring to the table, can you really justify your current ROI?

How can it improve when your Digital Marketer has learned these key skills?

In nearly every organization, ROI can grow significantly at every level of the buyer’s journey with these hands-on, highly-valuable tools, skills, and strategies.

Find out more about the personalized Digital Marketing and HubSpot platform training available to you and your team to help increase your ROI.