Getting Marketing ROI for the Rest of 2022

It’s like taking the pie you baked for eight people and stretching it to feed 30. How can a marketer get the most return on investment?

My daughter just started her first year of college. Her father and I spent years saving for college, thinking about tuition, dorm costs and books. You know what we never thought about?

The costs of decorating her dorm room. Which, apparently, is the Most Important Part Of College. How we didn’t know that is beyond her. Clearly, when we started planning back in 2003, a set of floor rugs shaped like flowers should have been our priority.

Spending your marketing dollars in the post-pandemic world of 2022 probably feels just like that — unexpected costs popping up faster than a college shopper at Target. There are so many competing channels, tactics and advice out there. It’s like taking the pie you baked for eight people and stretching it to feed 30. How can a marketer get the most return on investment?

Planning Marketing ROI for Q4 2022

Here are five guidelines for planning for the rest of 2022 and beyond:

Go Where Your Audience Is

The biggest mistake we all make is assuming we know our audience. But the world is changing — more rapidly than we would like to acknowledge — which means your audience is changing, too. Marketers have never had more data to research and understand their audiences, and yet many of us rarely spend time analyzing it. In fact, a study by Forrester showed that 57% of marketers feel overwhelmed by their data.

How about hanging out where your audiences are? Shop your stores. Read the comments. Do usability studies. Call customers — yes, radical, maybe, but a great way to find out what your audience is thinking in real-time. If one customer says it, and then another customer says it, you’re probably seeing the beginning of a trend. You can get such valuable clues when you go to your audience and spend time with them, instead of just researching them from afar.

Related Article: 5 Things to Accomplish After Your Customer Advisory Board Meeting

Don’t Hire an Architect When a Hammer Works Fine

Marketers LOVE big tools. The problem is that sophisticated technology platforms require setup, training, adoption and maintenance. And rarely do those parts make their way into the budget. So, you spend all this money to buy a technology platform and use 5% to 25% of it, wasting your marketing dollars.

If it makes sense to procure the platform because it’s part of your long-term strategy, then go ahead. I give you permission. But ensure you put aside dollars — and many of them — to pay for training and maintenance. Think about how your corporate culture will assimilate a platform and prepare your internal teams by showing them the long-term value. Otherwise, it will sit, with no one knowing how to use it, and everyone getting frustrated that it’s gathering dust.

Specify Your Channel Strategy (So You Don’t Throw Away Your Dollars)

Each channel has a different feel, culture and audience. What may perform well on Reels won’t go anywhere on TikTok. And a tweet just doesn’t translate to a Facebook post. LinkedIn is shifting in tone and strategy, which means personal posts may perform better there than on Facebook. (Cue scream emoji.)

So how do you ensure your paid and organic budgets aren’t wasted by publishing the same content on each channel, expecting the same results?

This is not crazy advice: Create a quick strategy for each channel. We use Insta for our current employees, LinkedIn for clients and prospects, Twitter to build community and Facebook for video and link distribution. That’s an example, but it helps you think about how, why and where to share your content — and what dollars to throw behind each channel so you’re not slicing that pie into 30 tiny slices. (Yum, pie.)