Important ROI Stuff You’re Not Thinking About

Content remains king, remaining the best long-term strategy for online marketing. Content remains undefeated when it comes to really getting a return on investment. From white papers, blogs, webinars and email marketing, content allows marketing and sales department to really get their hooks in the complete lead-to-client life cycle.

One of the challenges across the ROI landscape has been being able to actively target users across the web. Right now, you’re probably relying on Google Analytics, which uses cookies. The problem with cookies is that they get lost as users jump from mobile device to mobile device to desktop. You can imagine how much data tracking gets lost here. The solution great minds are brimming with is a “Universal Analytics” approach that assigns user IDs to visitors. This allows you to connect your CRM with Google Analytics and track each visitor through the conversion process.

There’s also an emphasis on recapturing visitors you left a website without converting. You’ve probably already seen by being blasted with ads for websites you browsed through. It’s a new twist on ROI with companies “remarketing” to a potential client pool. It’s easier to give a couple extra nudges to a potential client than to loop in new ones.

Your social capital is well on its way to affecting both SEO and paid searches by linking up with your Google Plus account. It’s another way Google is desperate to make Google plus relevant – and what better way than to encourage marketers to connect with their Google + account as a way to increase their ranking?

You can forget about link building unorganically. Google police is cracking down on shady link building efforts, including directory listings and reciprocal exchanges with the intention of severely penalizing anyone involved. You can be penalized even if you haven’t taken any of these steps and have still be round up by someone else – just take advantage of Google’s Disavow Tool. You probably should have seen this one coming considering the web is getting more and more complex. I don’t even want to think about how much time and money companies have spent on these campaigns. A takeaway lesson here is to project web trends before jumping on the marketing bandwagon. Project an intelligent forecast to see whether your ROI efforts are worth it.

Let’s face it: We can’t get a grip on mobile. Maybe you’ve paid for a mobile friendly version of your website, but how many times can you re-optimize your site for the newest mobile gadget? The best solution is to have a site that can adapt to any user on any old, new, or upcoming device. You’ve likely spent a collective fortune on your company, including your website. Yet how much return on investment are you really going to get if tablet users (who do the majority of web browsing) are trying to visit your site. As conversion optimization specialist Alhan Keser puts it:

“If you have a list of links with fewer than 40 pixels of space around them, then users are likely to make mistakes when tapping a link. Are you asking users to fill out a lengthy Web form? Forget about it. No one likes typing an essay on an iPad. Smartphone users have even more needs. Not only are they using their thumbs, but they are also very goal oriented. If a smartphone user is on your website, it’s most likely because he or she wants to call you, find you, or quickly get an idea for what it is you do. That means providing those actions explicitly, with large buttons, and having a website that loads quickly.”

The answer, according to Keser, is to say hello to the one-size-fits-all website courtesy of Fork, an open-source CMS solution. This is probably one of the most important yet overlooked aspects of ROI.