CMO Roundtable with Payroll Vault's Jessica Martin

How is technology helping you measure the return on your marketing and ad spend?

Marketing and advertising are essential components of Payroll Vault’s business strategy. However, measuring the effectiveness of our marketing and ad spend traditionally has been challenging. We’ve relied on broad metrics such as impressions and clicks to evaluate a campaign’s success and are continually working to construct our ideal marketing ecosystem.

Fortunately, advances in technology have enabled our team to gain more granular insights into how our marketing and ad spend are affecting our bottom line. Here are five ways technology is helping us measure the return on our investments.

1) Data analytics. Our marketing team is measuring ROI through data analytics. Data analytics software allows us to aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources, including website traffic, social media engagement, and sales data. By examining this data, we can more easily identify which campaigns are driving the most revenue and make adjustments.

2) Marketing automation. Marketing automation tools help us streamline the marketing process by automating tasks such as email campaigns, lead generation, and social media posts. These tools provide more control over campaigns, allowing our team to test a multitude of approaches and optimize our efforts based on actionable data.

3) Marketing dashboards. Our marketing dashboards don’t provide real-time visibility for campaign performance, so we are focused on improving that. Our existing dashboards can display data from various sources, such as social media, email, and website traffic, giving our team a comprehensive view of our campaign’s effectiveness, although not in real time.

4) Attribution models. Although our attribution models help us identify some of the touch points in the customer journey that are driving conversions, this is an area of opportunity. Our current technology allows restricted views of various factors, such as the type of engagement (e.g., clicks, views, and conversions). As we continue to develop our ecosystem, we will have a more transparent understanding of which touch points are most effective and be able to optimize our campaigns for maximum ROI.

5) Artificial intelligence. AI-powered tools can easily analyze large amounts of data and provide insights into our customers’ behaviors and preferences. We are just beginning to lean into this technology. Our vision is that this information will help our team create enhanced personalized and directed campaigns, leading to higher conversion rates and a stronger ROI.

Technology is playing a vital role in helping our team measure the return on our marketing and ad spend. By leveraging resources and tools such as data analytics, marketing automation and dashboards, attribution models, and artificial intelligence, we continue to buttress our ability to gain deeper insights into our campaigns’ effectiveness and, consequently, optimize our overall marketing strategy to get the best results.