Return on Investment

Return on Investment (ROI) is a fancy way of saying, “Was my money well spent?”

Morgan says: Let’s say you are the owner of a company that makes denim fabric.  Business is booming and your orders exceed your current ability to produce denim.  You want to purchase a new weaving machine to turn your inventory of cotton threads into denim.  You have to decide what machine to buy.  One of the many things you will consider is: how quickly will this machine produce enough denim to justify the expense of its purchase?  In other words, how quickly will I see a return on my investment in a new machine?

Without over complicating this scenario with business accounting and finance considerations, it is relatively easy to see the connection between a piece of machinery and how much product it produces.  

Calculating ROI for your marketing expenses, isn’t always so straight forward.  The Holy Grail for a marketing professional would be the ability to directly correlate sales to an advertisement, promotional piece, contest, or giveaway. At present, it is difficult to validate in hard data what marketing process works best to justify the expense and this is what our whole platform is about, turning myths into simple tips authors can do for FREE.

The primary example is our web address. Yes, we own the domain and our web address could be athormarketing101.com but we’ve kept the .blogspot. for now because that is free. The template is a standard one with a different color for the banner. Everything else about our site is standard, free, and really easy to maintain and promote.  

Therese says: I was highly amused to see a ploy in process to generate a tangible ROI by Michael Hyatt. He’s announced more than once that his marketing book PLATFORM is available for purchase but he doesn’t want anyone to buy it – yet. He is using his own platform to withhold sales until this week (5/21/12) in hope the surge will be enough to land him on the NY Times Bestseller list. I applaud his efforts and hope he succeeds.

I’ve followed Mr. Hyatt’s blog since he was CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, a few years ago. He posted daily, refined his platform into LEADERSHIP, and has incorporated a variety of electronic gadgets and processes into his web presence. He’s now an international motivational speaker and has thousands of followers that may multiply daily. If he succeeds and hits The List – he will have hard ROI data regarding his marketing platform to generate sales of his book. All his years of dedication to his career, platform, promotions, and building his distribution lists, could land him on the bestseller list this week, by his own design.

[Update 6/2/2012 - Mr. Hyatt announced his book hit FIVE bestseller lists ]

This in no way assures his example of building a platform is a book of value to novelists. The Return on Investment would not be measurable until you gained enough exposure through best-selling novels. Then you could try to turn that success into an agenda in hopes your fans will hop on your platform.  

In upcoming posts, we will explore some ways to try to measure the success of your marketing efforts.

Any marketing questions can be posed in the comments on any post. If you have a question, others will too, so we can address our answers to all. Our posts are myths and tips we feel are needed for us to share but we would love to target our answers to specific questions.