We’re often asked which type of online campaigns is the best. Our answer is always; “It depends on your goal, time frame, budget, and more important, expected ROI”. The 2nd question is always “but which one provides the best ROI?”
It’s always hard to compare online marketing campaigns ROIs because they vary greatly. They vary between industries and products and also between campaign types.
So instead of providing hard numbers we gathered our own data and merged them with data we found online. The results are return on investment (ROI) ranges going a small 1.1x ROI for partner deals to 8x ROI for WOM/Viral campaigns.
WOM and Viral’s ROI
Word of mouth and viral online campaign projects are considered the holy grail for any web site. Who wouldn’t want to get ten and hundred of thousands (dare to dream of millions) new visitors to their site at a close to zero marginal cost? Everyone, but very few succeed. And because of the very low success rate very few try. Is it fear of failure? Believing a site should growth on its own and that’s it? Imagining doing something that relates too much to traditional marketing? Not techie enough? Or perceived as too hard to mix techie and marketing skills? There’s always plenty of good reasons for not trying.
The truth is there’s simply too much at stake for not even trying. From wacky ideas like Blendtec’s very viral videos to viral widget like some of Facebook’s apps (truth be told there have been few successful ones and many more failures) there are so many ways you can make your content and site viral.
You can start from one of the following points by getting people to plant seeds for you (the more leverage points you use the more viral it gets):
- Taps into people’s curiosity about other people (yes, we’re all noisy at some point).
- Tap and enable people to help their close ones, friends and strangers.
- Tap into people need to waste time and being easily distracted (no pun to Facebook and Twitter)
- Tap into people little greeds (save little or big, make more…)
The bottom line is we’re all humans so build something tapping into our human qualities and faults.
Word of mouth doesn’t have to be fancy widgets or videos (although they’re very low costs). A simple “Refer a friend” or “Send a friend” link on your pages goes a long way. It’s zero cost and you get extremely targeted traffic.
Above all, just try it. Simply spend a few hours out there to see what’s been very effective and what’s not. More important, understand the levers successful campaigns used because at a very very low cost you can get a huge ROI.
Results: Average 8x to (theoretically) infinite return on investment.
SEO’s ROI
Ahh, the elusive SEO’s ROI… Contrary to what many may think tracking the ROI of SEO activities is not that complicated. It’s mostly a question of being persistent; you need to keep track of change you made over a long period of time. As it may take 1 to 4 months to fully see the results of seo improvement to some pages (or a whole site) this is not for people and companies with short attention span (or with a magic bullet mindset).
Even more important, SEO improvements need to be well executed. This take time and dedication, not fire and forget. Don’t put your people with ADD like attitude on SEO projects. Your person(s) in charge of such projects need to be extremely well organized and detailed oriented to be successful.
In order to have a longer lasting impact your SEO project should be self-reinforcing; anyone can improve and tweak a page’s title, its meta description and keyword relevance. But creating or adding useful information and tools that people will use and link can make your site a trusted topical authority. Achieve this and your SEO ROI will jump through the roof.
The return on investment varies greatly by industry, scale of project and time spent on the project but you can easily get a 5x return on investment on any well crafted SEO improvement.
Results: Average 5x to 9x the investment
Pay per click (PPC)’s ROI
Call it PPC, Sponsored advertising or more generally, Search Marketing, at the end of the day you pay an amount per click and you get traffic. Easy to implement, easy to measure and easy to get fairly good results. More and more companies are doing such campaigns and it’s because it’s getting so easy. Very process and data oriented, so very straightforward to do.
Unless you’re working with a firm that doesn’t really know what they’re doing or have internal resources that are overloaded by other projects, achieving a reasonable ROI with PPC is fairly easy. Try it, your manager will love the results.
Results: Average of 1.3x to 2.1x your investment
Partnerships’ ROI
This category of marketing campaigns included Affiliate marketing, Partner deals with other sites and pretty much any type of online marketing activities that translated into sharing your revenues with a partner. And there lies the biggest roadblock to achieve a good ROI out of partners deals; you have to share your revenue with someone else! Doing a CPA deal or revenue share and sharing 10, 20, 30% of your revenue with a partner cut your ROI by the same amount.
Affiliate deals and CPA advertising are still a little better because you only share a percentage of your revenue. In the cases of deals where you need to provide resources involving more cost for you to a partner (shared marketing cost, content deals, etc) these costs cut even deeper into your ROI. On top of it if these costs are recurring you can’t think of recuperating your cost and to top it all if you have to constantly provide a partner with additional and new resources you’re stuck in a little ROI dead end.
Naturally these type of partners can easily scale if you have the resources (read investment) in place to growth and maintain them. The only issue is that scale doesn’t always equal good traffic. Some affiliates are famous for bad traffic and partner sites can provides huge amount of badly targeted traffic (and you’ll hear your ROI shrink).
In other words think twice or at least get into that type of online marketing activities when you have exhaust the other lower hanging fruits.
Results: Average of 1.1x-1.3x your invesment
So if you’re short of time, have a good budget and want to deliver results quickly, PPC is the best road to take. You want to achieve greater results with lower budget and have more time to spend and experiment? Then go along the WOM/Viral and SEO roads. If you’re already doing the previous ones and have optimized their ROIs, or are desperate to get any type of results and large volume, then online partnerships are the way to go.
Pick your road, your strategy and then have fun while you’re on it!
Would you like to share your experiences? Feel free to do it.
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