While your return on investment (ROI) offers a highly quantitative way to determine the success of your marketing campaigns, many marketing executives are tracking a more qualitative metric – return on engagement (ROE).
In today’s new media environment, you can look at media in a different way, through three categories:
First, there’s owned media, or assets you already own, such as your website.
Then there’s paid media. That represents media you pay for, such as advertising.
Finally, there’s earned media. That’s the value of media you earn not through cash, but by participating in social media or engaging in other ways with customers, prospects, and the general public. For example, there’s significant value in the number of people who tweet and retweet positive mentions of your brand or products on Twitter, the number of “likes” you accumulate on your Facebook page, or even the number of comments you get on your own blog.
In short, the more people who follow your brand, and what you have to say, boosts your influence among thousands, if not millions, of potential buyers.
Return on engagement is simply the payback you may expect on your investment in connecting through new media outlets. Although there are costs in terms of time and resources for engaging in social media, there can be benefits including enhancing your influence and making your brand stronger.
Through these techniques, people may help sell your products to their own connections – if they get a sense that you’re willing to engage in conversations about your company and products. And that could result in the need to spend less on traditional marketing.
