Businesses that do not invest in their future may find themselves without one. Whether it’s in human resources or crucial technology, some short-term investment is usually required for long-term success. That is also true in marketing; you cannot sell your product or service without spending money on advertising. You’re in trouble if that investment doesn’t result in leads and conversions. There is no single best practice or one-size-fits-all strategy for identifying and applying the most appropriate metrics depending on business goals.
However, as I discovered when I joined Brightpearl to restructure the marketing campaigns, effective use of return on advertising expenditure (ROAS) data may triple lead production. Let’s look at some of the ways Brightpearl uses ROAS to boost lead generation and optimize advertising. The idea is to figure out what a healthy ROAS looks like for your company so you can optimize accordingly.
It is critical to use the appropriate return metric for calculating your ROAS. Your sales cycle will play a role in this.
Brightpearl’s sales cycle is quite long. It takes two to three months on average, and up to six months in some cases, so we don’t have a lot of data on a monthly basis if we want to use new customer revenue data as a return indicator. Revenue may be used by a company with a quicker sales cycle, but that doesn’t help us optimize our marketing.
Instead, we went with the sales acceptable opportunity (SAO) value. We normally measure for a month so that we may get more ROAS data at the same time. It’s the final sales stage before a win, and it’s more in line with our company’s purpose (to increase recurring annual income), but it takes less time to collect data.
We know which leads are good quality at the SAO stage since they have the budget, are a good fit, and our software can meet their needs. We can utilize them to assess the success of our campaign.
When choosing a return statistic, make sure it aligns with your company’s aim while also being quick to obtain data. Because the goal of employing ROAS or other metrics is to optimize your campaigns, it must also be measurable at the campaign level. Many businesses, I’ve discovered, are afraid of missing out on chances, which encourages them to advertise across all channels rather than focusing efforts on the most successful ones.
Prospects typically conduct their research through various channels, so you should aim to cover all of them. This may theoretically increase lead generation, but only if you had an unlimited marketing budget and people resources.
