One of the biggest challenges we face as marketers is giving concrete evidence as to why management should invest in a particular initiative. This is because the results of a given campaign are quite often intangible and difficult to quantify, but as anyone would tell you, they’re also completely invaluable.

Marketing has the difficult job of developing brand awareness, and part of that is driving traffic to your website. Not only do we have to attract a lot of attention, but we also have to attract the right people. At Blitzen we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to measure marketing ROI, focusing our efforts on solving this pain point.

In his article The Riskiest Investment A Startup Can Make, Tom Tunguz outlines the novel concept of ‘ROMO’ or Return on Marketing Objectives. As Tunguz explains, ROMO expands the traditional ROI concept to include marketing’s impact on brand equity value, using techniques like Net Promoter Score to measure the impact of marketing dollars spent. This is where we get excited, because this is the space Blitzen plays in.

Blitzen is an advanced platform for managing leads, and one of our specialities is lead capture forms. Whenever you’re driving traffic to your website, it’s likely that a form is involved. Think landing pages, lightboxes, and slide-ins for capturing customer info. Blitzen takes this a step further by not only helping you capture leads, but also provide insights on which of your marketing campaigns are working, through two features:

• Query parameters that make it easy to see where your leads came from.
• Tracking pixels to measure social conversions and form submissions.

Query Parameters

Query parameters allow us marketers to get an inside scoop on how our everyday activities are being received, and it’s really easy. Chances are, when you create campaign collateral for your company, you use a few different distribution channels to get the word out. Some likely candidates you may choose to spread the word with are landing pages, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

But the problem is that when we succeed with our campaigns, we often don’t know which channels are helping us win customers. Is Facebook driving the best leads, or is it Instagram? Likes and shares don’t tell us who is buying, they just tells us we gained some hype. That’s great, but knowing where our leads are actually converting from is even better. Having this insight will tell us which marketing channels deserve our focused time.

Our goal is to ensure that you aren’t blindfolded when it comes to your marketing efforts. With query parameters, you can add a small tracking line, or ‘query string’, in your form URL that will track which of your form conversions came from a particular distribution channel.

While this all sounds very technical, you won’t need to knock on your dev team’s door to get started. Trust me, query parameters are easily implemented by even the least tech savvy marketers. With this added functionality you’ll know exactly which channel is getting people to sign up for your trial, download more information, purchase your product or service, and anything else your campaign was tracking.

Similarly, when you invest your cherished marketing dollars into ad campaigns, you and your manager want to know whether or not they’re working. To know this for sure, you need more insight than just click-throughs and page views can provide. Diving deeper and measuring actual form conversions will tell you which of your ad campaigns are actually driving results.

Tracking Pixels

This is where tracking pixels come in. Blitzen allows you to track every form submission that comes from your Google and Facebook ad campaigns. This mean you’ll know exactly which ads to continue investing in because they are actually converting, allowing you to stop guessing based on clicks, and identify those campaigns that aren’t delivering the returns you’d anticipated. Investing your time, energy and money into the ads that actually make sales sounds like a pretty good year-end evaluation to me.

So, query parameters and tracking pixels are powerful tools on their own, and when used together they’re a game changer. And while these tools definitely help us prove ROI, how do we go about measuring ROMO? While it would be hard to disagree with Tunguz that it is still very hard, if not impossible, to quantify the complete impact of marketing, there are a few things that we can definitely measure.

While query parameters and tracking pixels can be used to help us measure ROI, voice-of-customer surveys take things one step further and help us understand whether we’re succeeding with our overarching marketing objectives. Since ROMO is based on measurements such as Net Promoter Score and brand recall, instead of just guessing how well you’re doing, the most effective way to measure this is surprisingly simple: just ask.

Voice-of-customer surveys allow you to connect directly with your audience and gain valuable insights, right from the source. They’re also a great way to measure things like Net Promoter Score, which is the likeliness that a customer would promote your product or service to another person. When it comes to measuring your Net Promoter Score, this can be done by asking one powerful question: “How likely would you be to recommend us?” This deceptively simple question can actually be a leading indicator of growth for you business, and it’s one that can be easily measured using a Blitzen survey.

Likewise, ROMO can also include the concept of brand recall, which is a measure of how well your brand is associated with a particular class of products, and which is most often measured through surveys. For example say you are the head of marketing at Tesla, and you want to measure your brand recall. By sending a survey and asking your audience “name as many car makes possible” you can get a quick measure of how well the ‘Tesla’ brand is associated with ‘cars’ and therefore, how well you’re doing with brand recall. ROMO measurability achieved!

Proving marketing ROI may sound like a difficult task, but Blitzen makes it easy. The power of Blitzen comes from leveraging functionality like Blitzen Ad Campaign tracking, query parameters and surveys like voice-of-customer survey options. We make it easy for you to gain deeper insights, and uncover where your marketing efforts are winning.