MROI…What? How?

You put a lot of time, effort, and creativity into your marketing. From strategy to platform to implementation, every small business owner puts hours of time into marketing their business.

Now that it’s up and running, how do you know it’s working? On the assumption you are getting response, do you know whether or not your marketing is paying off? Yep, that’s the $64,000 question — what’s your MROI, or Marketing Return on Investment.

There are different formulas you can use to slice and dice your data. But first you must be collecting it. Depending on the platform or media you are using, it may be more, or less, easy to capture the numbers you need.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume you want to look at the MROI of your latest campaign, not your complete marketing plan.

You’ll need to know what you spent on the campaign. If it’s an email campaign on your existing platform, you don’t have to count the cost of the platform since the assumption is you are using it for other things also. Some things to consider are:

Cost of strategic plan (this includes your time or the time of your employee/s who developed it)
Cost of copywriting (to achieve the final product)
Cost of graphics
Cost of sales
Cost of goods sold
# of leads generated
# of leads converted
Total sales

You can dive deeper but this is a basic starting point.

Now for a basic formula. Look at ‘Sales’ minus ‘Marketing Investment’ divided by ‘Marketing Investment’. This gives you the percentage of return on your investment.

For example, if your sales from the campaign totaled $100,000 and your marketing investment was $10,000, your return would be 900%.

To learn more, check out these resources:

The bottom line message here is always know your numbers.