It’s a no brainer that digital marketing strategies are more effective than the traditional marketing ones. But by how much? This is the most common question that I have been asked from my clients when we meet for the first time. How can you effectively calculate the return on your hard earned cash from digital means?

It’s an easy task for the ecommerce sites to calculate the ROI with the direct sales. You can see all that website traffic converting into clicks ultimately resulting in sales of your products. For every dollar invested, you can calculate the return on that dollar. “But then what about my restaurant? How can I see where’s my cash is going that I am spending on digital marketing?”, asked an owner of a fast food restaurant in Downtown Toronto.

For businesses, which deal in services like restaurants, Doctors, Physiotherapists, calculating ROI is a little different process. For service based businesses the efficacy of digital marketing is calculated through business awareness, website hits, audience engagement and followership.

How much of your target audience is aware of your business and willing to do business with you is an effective measure of your ROI. Below are some parameters on which you can measure your ROI-

• The leads generated through the contact us form,
• of phone calls to your businesses by prospective customers
• of people asking for directions to your business
• Followership on social media platforms
• Audience engagement
• Website traffic

Although these parameters do not result in as quantifiable results as in the case of e-commerce websites, nonetheless, these measure your business’ digital presence. The more the digital presence, the more the no. of new customers you will get.