Yes, when it comes to marketing we are always discussing a company’s Return on Investment, or ROI. But this shouldn’t just apply to Marketing. This should be an administrative tool we use on the regular and in all areas of our company. From Customer Service to Sales to Marketing to HR. Everything you ‘invest’ in, whether time or money or energy, has a ‘return’ tied with it. Whether it’s a good return or not? Well that depends on what you’re investing in. Let’s break down a few of those together.
Marketing:
This is the most obvious of the areas where we would want to see a Return on Investment, but it is often the most difficult. Much of the ROI in Marketing is invisible. How can you truly know if it’s a strategy you’re using or the culmination of word of mouth. Perhaps it’s your paid ads on Google, or it might just be an organic happenstance. In most cases, it is probably a mix of both, but how do you determine money spent vs money it gained.
The answer is, you can’t ever know completely. But, if you’re willing to put the time and energy in, you can come pretty close.
Try these:
- Compare last year to this year Spending Vs Earned
- Every 3 Months make small changes to test your numbers
- Survey Customers/Run Reports to find out where those leads came from
- Use ‘Call to Action’ buttons to trace information
Customer Service
Customer Service is another area where the ROI indicators are nearly impossible to gauge. However, anyone who has ever had a bad experience with Customer Service knows the benefit of good Customer Service. That’s why companies like Walmart and Costco spend all of that extra money on additional staff. There is no way to figure out how much return is being gained on that investment. However, those companies chose and choose daily to maintain this Customer Service program because the return is real, just not visible.
If you want to test it, then try these:
- Compare last year to this year revenues
- Compare reviews on sites like Google
- Survey Customers as they come in
Sales
This is an easy one. We invest a lot of time into our sales departments. From training to expenses to most of our overhead costs, our Sales Departments get the “Gold Star” treatment. I think that is a two-fold strategy. For one, Sales bring in money, and without money the company doesn’t survive. But the second, which ties closely to that, is that this is one of the few departments where you can easily break down the return on investment. You can take the Gross Revenue and subtract the costs of goods and labor and overhead and determine what that sale was worth.
That being said, I have seen many companies who have the tools to measure things like Net Profit and Profit Margins. And yet, they tend to just run without looking and hope for the best. That’s not a good business practice and you will never know the actual ROI of a sale or the salesman’s time by doing things that way.
Human Resources
The last department I want to focus on today is Human Resources. I chose this department as the last one we look at because I believe it is the ROI that is most important to any good company. The investment here is your employees. You invest in them with your time, energy and money. And their return is the greatest you can ever receive in business. Ever.
These are the people who, when the company plunges into a pandemic, stick with it to pull it through. Don’t be mistaken thinking they had no choice or that it was the better choice. I can promise you making more money and having to do nothing for it would have been the better choice for them. It would have been safer and less chaotic. And yet, they stayed. YOU SHOULD BE APPLAUDING THEM!
They are the ones who, when 3/4 of the staff is out sick, carry the load of the entire team to keep the place running until the other’s return. They are not your pets, so don’t treat them like dogs. They didn’t have to carry that burden, but they did it for you. Why? Because you invest in them… and this is their return to you.
So invest in your staff and know that the return is well worth it! As we invest in a brighter tomorrow!!
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