Which Digital Marketing Strategies Have The Highest ROI?

The pandemic drove people online for purchases of all kinds that they once made in person as quarantine orders and stay-at-home orders kept people at home. That left businesses with no choice but to rush online after them.

That rush online saved many businesses. Since then, things have grown more competitive as businesses have largely reopened to the public. Where companies could rely on online sales during the pandemic, now they must compete with better established digital businesses.

That means they must get up to speed on digital marketing strategies. But which ones? Keep reading for a breakdown of the options with the best ROI.

What Is ROI?

Before delving into the strategies themselves, it may prove helpful to look at ROI itself. Return on investment is essentially a measurement of how much you make compared with how much you spend.

Let’s take a look at an example.

So, let’s say you buy a piece of machinery for your business. The machine costs $10,000, and you sink another $3000 into it in maintenance and utility costs. That gives you a total of $13,000 invested over the life of the machine.

The machine makes widgets that you sell for $0.50 of profit each after marketing and shipping. If the machine makes 150,000 of them over its life, that gives you $75,000 of revenue. When you subtract the original cost, maintenance, and utilities, that leaves you with an ROI of $62,000.

You can apply the same approach with marketing strategies. You just subtract how much you spend from what you can reasonably say you made from the campaign. So, now let’s look at specific marketing strategies.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is often touted as the highest ROI digital marketing strategy. It’s also a typical example for answering the question, “Does digital marketing increase ROI?”

As marketing effectiveness varies from business to business, no specific number applies to everyone who attempts it. However, one of the more common stats thrown around is a potential $42 earned for every $1 spent on email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing is also beginner-friendly. You can set up an email list management account for no or little money and use those systems’ existing templates and formatting tools.

Some Caveats

Email marketing is often a tradeoff between low initial financial costs and high-time investments. After all, you must fill those emails with valuable content. That means spending the time or hiring someone to write that content.

You can just blast out ads every time and expect good results. People will just stop opening your emails.

You must also put in the work to build your list. That often means offering enticements to get people to sign up and opt-in.

Enticements may include everything from free digital reports and ebooks to coupons on your products or services.

SEO and Content Marketing

Next up on the list are search engine optimization and content marketing. These are often treated separately, but content marketing functions as a part of a good SEO strategy.

Search engine optimization is a hugely complicated subject. It touches on everything from user experience and navigation to behind-the-scenes things like image size and JavaScript. It also hits areas like content in terms of human readability, keywords, relevance, and authority.

Good content marketing, when treated separately, aims at producing content that site visitors will find helpful and relevant. That means that your general contracting business needs content that addresses things like picking the right shingles or DIY fixes for minor household problems.

Some Caveats

SEO and content marketing are long-term strategies. You must generally give them anywhere from six months up to a year before you see significant changes in traffic or revenue.

They’re also tough to maintain as a DIY project. Many of the technical elements of SEO need input from an IT pro, particularly on custom websites.

Writing good content week-in and week-out sounds easy, but it becomes challenging over time. That’s why many businesses use outside services, such as Bear Fox Marketing, that specialize in SEO and content marketing to handle that work.

That increases the financial costs but reduces stress and the need to find creative topics continually.

Local SEO

Local search engine optimization is a different beast entirely from traditional search engine marketing. For one, it keeps its focus on a particular target area. That area can prove as specific as a neighborhood or town and as broad as a state.

For example, let’s say you run a restaurant in Boise. You don’t need or even really want people in Tokyo to find your business online. You absolutely need people in Boise to find your business in online searches.

That means you’ll likely search for “local SEO services Boise” online. Those services will help you get your business listed in Google My Business and appear on local maps.

They’ll also often help you create locally-targeted content. For example, if there’s a big festival in the area, that festival name will likely pop up in your content.

It’s a great way to potentially boost local foot traffic in your business simply by heightening awareness and keeping you top of mind.

Some Caveats

Local SEO isn’t for everyone. It’s specifically aimed at businesses with a small footprint.

For example, they may sell products that don’t travel well or be a general contractor. Either of these businesses would likely benefit from local SEO.

On the other hand, an online-only store that sells vintage sneakers would get little to no use from it.

Digital Marketing Strategies and You

The reality is that digital marketing strategies are rarely an apples-to-apples comparison. That makes comparing ROI a tricky venture at best.

The strategies often operate on different timelines. They may not even target the same kinds of businesses. Some lend themselves to a DIY approach, while others really need input from professionals.

SEO and content marketing are generally the strategies of choice if you’re comfortable outsourcing because they work long-term.

Are you looking for more insight into online marketing? Check out some of the other posts over in our Technology section.