Marketing Efficiency

No one likes to waste money. So why would you invest in marketing that’s inefficient? Knowing how to improve digital marketing efficiency reduces your workload and reliance on IT resources, while increasing your ability to scale and optimize precious budget.  

What Is Marketing Efficiency?

Marketing efficiency refers to the result you get from a dollar of marketing spend. Marketing experts use this to determine the ROI of their marketing efforts.

Marketing efficiency can refer to the optimized ROI of individual marketing strategies, as it impacts revenue generated.  Additionally, it’s critical to ensure that the effectiveness of processes, engagement, and technology is considered to support those initiatives..

How to Measure

Marketing efficiency is relatively straightforward to calculate:

Marketing efficiency = (revenue / marketing cost) x 100.

To give an example, let’s say a company made $1.5 million in revenue during 2019 after spending $300,000 on marketing.

(1,500 / 300) x 100 = 500%

This percentage can be used as a benchmark to measure improvements in your company’s marketing effectiveness.

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Metrics to Track and Measure

There are a few marketing efficiency metrics that can help identify areas for improvement:

• Unique visitors. How many individual people are coming to your website? This can give insight into your overall traffic.
• Search engine traffic. How many people are referred to your site through search engines like Google? This gives you an indication of the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
• Pageviews. How many pages are your visitors navigating through during their time on the site? This may indicate how well you’re engaging your audience because they stick around.
• Conversion rate. Are your customers taking the action you want them to? If not, you might need to improve your marketing funnel or clearly define the target persona.

Brand recognition cost calculates the cost of improvement for brand awareness and recognition

• promotion cost / recognition improvement

Cost per lead calculates the efficiency of promotion efforts

• promotion cost / # of leads

Cost per reach calculates the efficiency for reaching a target audience

• cost of reach / (reach/100)

Customer acquisition cost calculates the efficiency of the process of bringing leads to close a sale

• cost to acquire / # of customers

Sales efficiency calculates the percentage of your revenue compared to sales costs

• (revenue / sales cost) x 100

Addressing Marketing Efficiency

The goal of marketing efficiency is to maximize a company’s input-output ratio. But that’s much easier said than done. There is rarely a simple fix since every tactic and strategy in a marketing plan requires constant maintenance and upkeep in order to perform to their fullest potential. One aspect of creating efficiency around marketing efforts is to build engaging, immersive content experiences that can be scaled easily but are deliberately built to address the questions your prospects or customers might have about your solutions, services, and offerings. Simply put, meeting your customers with information and experiences, designed for where they are in their journey is critical to success.  

There are three areas you can focus on to improve the ROI of your marketing, as it applies to content experiences: design, automation, SEO, and social media.

Design

Poorly designed brand assets, like content and website, can deter new prospects and even customers from engaging with your brand. It’s critical to ensure that assets, content experiences, and engagement are all top-notch and on-point.

Online tools like Adobe XD and Sketch are great for designing brand-specific content, images, assets that can be leveraged across the entire customer journey.  Any marketer will tell you that brand affinity and loyalty starts with creating consistent, seamless experiences.  

Additionally, Tiled’s microapp platform allows you to create and share experiential content to engage your audience and augment marketing efforts. These interactive, digital microapps are easy to build, personalize and share,so you can tailor them to meet customer needs at any point in the sales and marketing funnel.

Social Media Automation

Engaging customers on various channels (aka meet them where they are) is critical in the continued effort to drive brand loyalty.  In addition to creating the content for the various social platforms, it’s essential to create contextual, relevant experiences past the initial image. Building and sharing content experiences can be daunting. But combing  social media automation tools, like Sprout Social or Buffer, to help automate posts easily and leveraging Tiled’s microapps to deliver personalized digital content experiences, engaging followers, customers and prospects can be less stressful!  

SEO

Organic reach is a must for your digital marketing success. SEO involves using keywords and optimization strategies to get your website to the top of search engine result pages (SERP). This helps make search engines like Google and Bing become valuable allies for your business.

You’ll need access to quality keyword data to do well in SEO. Fortunately, resources like SEMrush allow you to see what keywords your competitors use and the competitiveness of words and phrases you’re looking to use in your content.

Examples of Marketing Efficiency

So how do you know when your efforts are starting to pay off? Depending on what kind of improvements you’ve focused on,  you could experience any of the following results:

• Increased web traffic
• Higher SERP rankings
• Reduced bounce rates
• Higher conversion rates

Creating relevant, immersive and experiential content experiences to enable full funnel engagement is critical if you’re interested in driving better results without overwhelming your IT or budget resources.  

To give some examples of marketing efficiency in practice, consider two projects from Tiled:

• Skullcandy saw the need to create more engaging content for their customer-facing brand. With the help of microapps, Skullcandy was able to create a dynamic approach to their sales presentations, in-store retail experience, virtual product launches, and partner and employee engagement, all while saving over $127,000 on hard costs.
• Alder Home Security was able to easily pivot to address customer needs as their in-person field sales model needed to account for a drastic change in market conditions.  After implementing Tiled microapps to address different stages of the engagement cycle, Alder increased their lead generation by 400 percent.

Improve Your Efficiency with Tiled

Ready to get started on your path towards better marketing efficiency? Request a demo of our microapps to see how interactive content experiences can improve your marketing efforts.