Has your boss ever asked you this question: So, what was the return on investment for our last marketing campaign?

Calculating marketing ROI can be tricky, especially for an unseasoned marketer. But ROI is an important metric, and speaking in business terminology helps raise the profile of marketing within your organization while also presenting the business case for running your campaign.

To make it easier, start thinking about ROI before you run your campaign. By projecting ROI, you’ll be able to compare initial projections to actual results which will help you diagnose any areas that under/over perform from your projections.

A good set of ROI tools always helps. In Growth Panel, use the following exercises in the Marketing Campaigns section of the Library:  530 - Quantify Your Campaign Goals; 533 - Campaign Budget & Metrics; 537 - Campaign Spreadsheet.

To build your projections:

1. Estimate your response rate
2. Project your response conversion rate
3. Determine how many impressions & leads you’ll need to hit your goals
4. Project your profit (either gross or net)
5. Record all costs
6. Calculate projected ROI

When your campaign is complete, load your actual results and compare.

Below are screenshots of the Growth Panel tools that will calculate these for you. To access them now, set up a Growth Panel account and you’ll have them in minutes.

Marketing Return on Investment Calculations

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ROI is best used for targeted campaigns with a distinct offer and tracking mechanism. If you’re running high-level brand-building campaigns without a trackable offer, it’s a good idea to lump those costs into a “brand investment” category.

But for every other campaign, it’s powerful to show your colleagues the profit returned for your marketing investments.

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Today we released two major updates to our intelligent marketing platform:

• Subscribe-by-subject option
• Updated exercise content for the Strategy portion of our exercise library

The subscribe-by-subject option allows users to get started at a much lower price-point compared to a full license. By subscribing to specific exercise subjects in the marketing library, users can tackle their immediate marketing challenges and add more subjects as needed.

This allows consultants, marketing teams and entrepreneurs to grow into the marketing platform as their business and budget allow. The subscribe-by-subject option is available for both Basic and Professional versions, matching the full functionality of each version with the ability to use the Library Exercises for subscribed subjects.

New Marketing Library Exercise Content

All Growth Panel versions now include new marketing library exercises with an expanded format to provide more detail and guidance. The expanded format delivers more detail for each task within each subject. Exercises contain more guidance, are broken down into modular tasks and provide greater context to show how each piece fits within the whole marketing process.

We created a few demos showing new exercise subject content if users would like a preview before subscribing. They’re already set to play in YouTube’s new HD. Click play and the full-screen icon in the lower right for best results.

Brand Strategy Subject Exercise Preview

Marketing Campaigns Subject Exercise Preview

Confused by Kevin Spacey trying to explain Twitter to David Letterman? “Type with your thumbs” …

While teenagers aren’t currently using Twitter, businesses are. If you’re not sure how to get started on Twitter and aren’t ready to hire a social media consultant, check out the next best thing–a comprehensive video that explains the benefits of Twitter for business and how to leverage it.

Twitter for Marketing

Thanks to Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing for HubSpot for covering this on the June 3, 2009 O’Reilly Webcast. HubSpot is a startup that delivers a pretty powerful inbound marketing platform for companies looking to generate more leads from their website.

We’re still Twitter rookies, but plan to start ramping up soon. Connect with us and Mike:

@growthpanel

@hubspot

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