How to calculate potential ROI for a media investment
This is my calculation which I use when I want to see if there is a business case behind a media investment for my clients or my own marketing initiatives. There are so much information available today, and from that you can manually calculate predictions and potentials before you choose to invest in a specific media, channel or campaign. Armed with the right specific, relevant numbers for your business and some industry averages you can create a hypothesis for the potential for an investment if you are unsure, or just want to make a calculation in terms how you should re-distribute your media budgets and what the potential could be. Marketing today, merges business savviness and analytical skills. There is just a question of time (I guess there already is someone out there who has turned this into a formula, if not, that someone could make some nice bit of cash on a software for this, collecting data from advertisers, merged with some kind of ad score to calculate predictions based on data available).
Email marketing strategy
Why should you use email marketing and when is it right for you?
If you want to be able to target your customer database with specific messages, or communicate with potential customers, in a cost effective manner - then email marketing is right for you.
The essentials to get you started with email marketing
To get started with your email marketing, there are some fundamental things to learn, but also you need to get an ESP (email service provider) of some sorts and a budget, however small it may be.
There are a couple of big companies that can offer you a service which may fit your budget even as a smaller business or you could opt for doing this by using an online software. Whatever your budget and goal is, it’s always an advantage to learn as much as possible about what you are getting yourself into. So you can arm yourself with the right information for success.
Defining the Customer Journey to Online Purchase (Path to Purchase)
A user journey/path to purchase is useful to help you develop communication, content and marketing strategies that are from your customers or potential customers point of view (i.e need based).
I like to simplify, so I have abandoned the classic AIDA model (attention, intention, desire and action) which was used in school way, way back then for: See, think, do and care - which from my perspective is more straightforward and easy to use in the work I do with my clients and more applicable in our current context (remember the AIDA model originated around 1898).
The key to data driven decisions
In today’s data driven world there is new data to gather insights from every minute of the day every day, from multiple locations, from multiple devices in various contexts about your customer, campaign performance and sales.
A monthly or weekly report for data is now obsolete, since the information you are viewing is not necessary relevant anymore and the information is already outdated when the PDF-reports start to hit your inbox.
And by the time you had the opportunity to get a gather all the relevant reports from all your relevant sources, the information is probably not relevant and in most cases only targeted to your marketing department within your organization.
To solve this challenge there are a plethora of new tools available to build a dashboard to vizualise the data in real time. Som simple apps you can download to your iPhone other more complex where you can add TV spot info and view in relation to visitor flow on your website.