Identify an ROI with your digital marketing investment

Metric #3: The Buyer’s Journey Map – Understanding Where Your Investment Goes

So far you have established the number you will weigh your investment against: the revenue goal. Then we identified what your needs are: the sales funnel deficiencies. Now we need to know where the investment needs to be allocated: The Buyer’s Journey.

Before you can properly estimate your investment cost, the number you will weigh against your goal or year-end revenue return, you need to know where your investment is needed and the cost to be there. Starting out with the identified sales funnel deficiencies, you need to look at which stages of The Buyer’s Journey to target with a marketing campaign.

What exactly is The Buyer’s Journey? The Buyer’s Journey is the path a potential customer/client takes to discovering your brand, buying your product, etc. It’s broken up into five stages or steps: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy. Each stage uses different tactics, strategies, and platforms to guide the user/potential client and each stage targets different funnel deficiencies. 

Contrary to popular belief each and every stage now costs money in some capacity. Whether it is paying for ads, hiring an agency to run a campaign or retaining a freelancer to design and write an email campaign. All. Of. It. Now. Costs. Money … Hard Stop.

Let’s take a look at the funnel deficiencies each stage targets and the platforms your investment will be allocated towards. Keep in mind, we are limiting this to digital platforms, not strategies like SEO, or CRO or traditional items like cold calling or networking. Those will go under other costs you will learn when we build the customer acquisition costs.

Let’s take a look at the funnel deficiencies each stage targets and the platforms your investment will be allocated towards. Keep in mind, we are limiting this to digital platforms, not strategies like SEO, or CRO or traditional items like cold calling or networking. Those will go under other costs you will learn when we build the customer acquisition costs.

• Awareness – To address top of the funnel deficiencies, asset allocation in this stage should include digital platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Snapchat.
• Consideration – To address lead and prospect deficiencies in the funnel, asset allocation in this stage should include digital platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Constant Contact or Mailchimp, select lead generation programs, and a sales CRM.
• Purchase – To fix demo or proposal stage deficiencies in the funnel, asset allocation in this stage should include digital platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Constant Contact or Mailchimp, live chat, and a sales CRM.
• Retention – For retention stage deficiencies, like account-based marketing, asset allocation in this stage should include digital platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Constant Contact or Mailchimp, and a sales CRM.
• Advocacy – Asset allocation in this stage should include digital platforms Facebook, Google, YouTube and select reputation management platforms.

Truly identifying your investment happens after you map out what stages and platforms are needed to eliminate pipeline deficiencies. Establishing the foundation of what your investment will be can only happen after you understand how The Buyer’s Journey works with your sales funnel, but more importantly what the current bidding environment is on those platforms and what digital assets (creative/strategy/management) you will need to run the campaign.

At this point, you should now begin to see a path to the mythical land called The ROI on your digital campaign investment. Hopefully, whether you are setting a revenue goal OR just want to see what your current ROI is, you can see the proper steps you need to take to get there.