Is your marketing budget tight with little chance of increasing? Are you expected to do more with less? How do you prove ROI to justify your activities?

Well, you’re not alone. Given the state of the economy, this is the real challenge all companies are facing. And even as the economy begins to strengthen, marketers are increasingly expected to be more accountable for every dollar spent. It seems that not only companies’ spending habits, but also the general public’s attitudes about money have been permanently changed as one recent article from Marketing Profs noted:

“One in four Americans (25%) say they are glad for the economic crisis, in that it has helped them recognize their priorities. Some 52% of Americans have permanently changed their attitudes to the importance of saving money…59% of Americans say they will do their best to not revert to pre-recession spending levels”.

With the heightened focus on ROI, it’s increasingly important to recognize the opportunities marketers have to prove campaign effectiveness. A successful, revenue producing program needs to include an integrated plan that is continuously tested and optimized based on data, and the flexibility to modify based on opportunity.

Let’s touch on these key elements for running a successful campaign and tracking the effectiveness of your marketing dollars.

1) Create an Integrated Approach:

Creating an integrated plan is essential to maximizing the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts. Success cannot be achieved by isolating each discipline in a vacuum, so you need to leverage all disciplines in order to get “the most bang for your buck”. A true integrated campaign will have a cohesive, 360⁰ plan that combines Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Paid Search (PPC), Usability, Social Media, and Analytics so that all areas are working together to achieve the same goals.

It is only through an integrated approach that you can gain efficiencies and share learnings across platforms. For example, high performing keywords from your PPC campaigns can be brought over into your SEO efforts. These key terms are not only relevant to user searches, but they are the terms on which users are taking action. Thus, it follows that you should be optimizing your website content with these same keywords to enhance and continue the conversion process. Another example is enhancing your Social Media strategy through the application of SEO best practices. By interacting with blogs that influence search results for targeted keywords, you can enhance search engine listings through link acquisition.

Also, if you are only referencing one analytics tool to provide all the data you need to make important business decisions, you’re only seeing a piece of the puzzle. By leveraging multiple platforms and configuring them to talk to one another, you can see the full funnel from where potential customers start to when the sale is complete. Tie your Analytics platform, to your CRM tool, to your Social Media monitoring tool, and so on. With the correct tracking in place, you can start to get visibility into which marketing efforts are working online and offline. More specifically, you can determine which keywords, which content, and which marketing initiatives directly result in a sale and begin to focus your resources and priorities accordingly.

2) Act Based on the Data:

The days of making business decisions based on your gut or what you think you know about your customers are gone. With all of the tools we have at our disposal today, it would be foolish to make any marketing decisions that do not stem directly from the numbers themselves. If you are correctly tracking and monitoring your data, it will be possible for you to analyze the trends and seasonality of your business, which efforts are having a positive effect, what results you should be concerned about, which areas require your resources, and in what priority.

There are three important items of note when you are driving your business decisions this way: a) ensure you’re tracking correctly, b) invest in tools as necessary, and c) apply deep analysis to the data.

a) Implementation and set up of your platforms is the most essential part of the process. If the tools have not been set up correctly, then the data is either inaccurate or not flowing at all, so why track anything in the first place? You need to believe in the integrity of your data in order to make important budgetary and marketing assessments. Likewise, it’s just as important to baseline all of your metrics once your platforms are implemented so that you have a starting point from which to track your results. Without this baseline, you’ll never know how far you’ve come.

b) We all know of the Google Analytics and Omnitures of the world, but there are new tools out there evolving every day that can provide insight into areas we never thought possible before. Through advanced Social Media monitoring tools you can now determine how many people are mentioning your company, on which sites they’re mentioning it, in what sentiment, and who is doing the talking. You can monitor buzz around your company and specific campaigns, track how many leads are coming in from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and yes, even attribute an ROI to your Social Media initiatives.

c) When you’re looking at your data on a regular basis, you shouldn’t always take it for face value. Frequently, questions or concerns arise that warrant deeper, and often times, additional research. Don’t just accept that your visits are down one month – probe the data and compare to your marketing calendars to understand why. Don’t just accept that your rankings are up on a few keywords, dig into the long tail permutations of those words to understand the full story. You should be able to walk away from your results with at least 3-5 actionable recommendations for changes to your program to be completed before the next round of reporting. This is the only way to have a continuous optimization cycle.

3) Test Test Test:

If you’re not sure if your approach will work, test it! That’s the beauty of online marketing, you can see results immediately and you can make changes just as quickly. The data doesn’t lie and those numbers give you a perfect proof point to what is working and what isn’t. From A/B and multivariate testing of your website architecture, to ad copy testing within your PPC campaign, all approaches can be tested, monitored, and changed or enhanced if necessary. Just ensure you have clearly stated your goals and you have established consistent criteria for determining the winner. Don’t be afraid to try something new; the worst that can happen is you don’t receive the results you expect, but you may be surprised at what you learn.

As marketers we may think we know what’s right for our business, our customers, and our website. In fact, each person within your company may have a slightly different opinion as to what is “right”, but testing takes the guess work out of your strategy—allowing you to make definitive decisions that will yield the best results for your business.

4) Don’t Be Afraid to Change the Plan:

It’s obviously important to have a strong strategy in place at the onset of your fiscal year, including identifying goals and establishing KPIs. However, you should take a look at your plan each quarter and make sure your approach ladders up to the business goals and marketing initiatives coming up.

If you are seeing trends in your data month after month, don’t ignore them. The original strategy you created may need to evolve as your business objectives and priorities evolve. There may be new developments in your industry or big news among your competitors. All of these unexpected changes require your attention, but you cannot address them if you are too focused on fulfilling on a strategy that no longer makes sense or does not deliver on the issues at hand. Be flexible and reallocate your resources and dollars toward the strategy that makes sense now. A lot can change from Q1 to Q3 and you should allow yourselves the flexibility to change with it under a fluid strategy and plan.