Currently, as a small and medium-sized business(SMB) owner, you do not only need to know that online marketing is an essential complement for brick and mortar store, but also should understand which kind of internet marketing campaign has the best return on investment (ROI). After all, choosing the digital marketing solution with the best ROI is critical for the online business development, especial for SMB. Once you find the suitable online marketing ways for the business, then track and improve its ROI, and sustain it over the long term, your online business will be an unquestionable success. So before commencing the online business, you need to know more about the different online marketing solution and their ROI.

Normally, Digital agency will provide many kinds of online marketing strategies: Paid Advertising(also be known as pay-per-click, PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing. It seems that all of them can fulfill the business sales demand. But they still have various function and ROI.

1.Paid Advertising

PPC (pay-per-click)  marketing is a way of using search engine advertising to generate clicks to your website, rather than “earning” those clicks organically. PPC Advertising often be displayed at the top of Google’s search results page, marked with a green “ad” label?

What will you invest in PPC?

Definitely the money. Once you deposit enough money in the PPC account, the paid advertising can attract the leads immediately after launch, only need several minutes simply setup, much faster than other online promotion.

What will you obtain from PPC?

Traffic. As we know the traffic is the most important factor for online business, PPC provides a quick way to obtain targeted customer who is searching your related business. More important, these customers have real demand for your goods and services.

Does it sound to have a good ROI?

Honestly, PPC is a decent way for SMB owners who want to try the online market as it’s convenient. Once you set up the PPC project and budge, the traffic will come up automatically.However, there are a few considering factors that complicate paid advertising. For example, the price per click depends on the Google algorithm can vary wildly. The calculating factors include competitors bid, landing page quality, Clickthrough rate and so on. The ROI of PPC project will fluctuate if competitors increase their bid.

Plus, no matter what platform you’re on, PPC is more like paying rent for search engines. Once you cut funding to paid ads, they instantly turn off, and the only lasting value you get from it is the sales you made while the ads were active.

Another negative factor of PPC is, it only brings your traffic. The power to push visitors to buy the goods or services still needs persuasive content.

2. Social marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media platform in order to achieve your sales goal and enhance branding awareness in public. Normally, social media marketing includes activities like posting text and image updates, rich media, and other content that drives audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising.

What will you invest in SMM?

An experienced social specialist. You need to hire a social marketing specialist to monitor the reviews from audiences. Also, the social specialist needs to answer the inquiry and after sale issue from audiences carefully as the official feedback will be spread out very quickly on the social platform. At the same time, the social specialist should publish the compelling article on the social platform.

What is the return you will gain in SMM?

Build the brand on the web. Social media has incredible spread speed faster than other online strategies, no matter good news or bad news. So it’s a good way to build brand awareness if you have a well-designed broadcast plan. In contrast, the negative news of your company also is known by public quickly.

Another feature in SMM is the interaction between the official announcement and audiences. The company can use this effective channel to know more about what audiences demand and feedback. And use such customers’ data to improve the goods or services.

Hard to assess the SMM’s ROI

Depending on the scale of your efforts, social media marketing could cost thousands of dollars per month. As for the value–that’s trickier to measure than the results you’ll get from SEO or direct advertising. As most of the advantage of SMM is the feedback from audiences, it’s not the necessary part of buying procession. You can measure engagements, traffic, and conversions, but it’s hard to accurately quantify the reputation value your brand has generated. Plus, there’s a wide variation between industries when it comes to social effectiveness, and the price of paid social media ads.

3. Search engine optimization(SEO)

Search Engine Optimization refers to a variety of techniques that make a website search engine friendly. Generally, SEO optimization services include content optimization and links building. Through compelling and persuasive articles to provide the information to the visitors who are looking for the related terms. This is the core value of the internet culture, also is the start point of the online business.

Unlike with paid advertising obtains the visitors immediately after released, SEO campaign is a slow procession because search engines need several weeks or months to index and rank your website.

What will you invest in SEO?

Normally, a small and medium-sized business company can hire an SEO specialist(salary starts from 5000AUD/m) to respond the content writing and link building or authorize an SEO agency to carry out the online optimization strategy. Compare these two options, optimize the website by the employee will have tailored plan and good internal communication while the SEO agency has an efficient operation and solve the emergency issue with the teamwork power.

The quote of small and medium-sized business SEO is in a wide range. It can be from AUD500 to AUD 2000, it depends on your niche market and the overview of competition. Obviously hiring an SEO company can save a lot of money for the SMB owner.

What is the return you will gain in SEO?

Traffic. But this traffic isn’t as same as the PPC advertisement. SEO can bring you the organic traffic which is meaningful and free. You don’t need to worry about the cost of each click and the nasty clicks by competitors. More important, the true power of website optimization is its ability to scale exponentially over time; rather than giving you linear results, as with paid advertising, every new piece of content you produce will hold a lasting, semi-permanent value for your brand in terms of web real estate, referral traffic, and domain authority.

SEO’s ROI is measurable

The SMB owners can use the following metrics to assess whether SEO efforts are having an impact on the online business.

Ranking Increases

The rankings for the keywords you’re targeting should see a steady increase over time if the strategy works.
That’s not to say there won’t be some bumps in the road. Over 80% of the SERPs change every single day according to MOZ report. It looks like the stock market: the increase should be consistent, but it must be looked at as a long-term investment. As long as you’re steady execute the SEO plan, you should be able to reach high placement for many of your terms.

Organic Traffic Increases

As your placement on the SERPs increase, so should your traffic from organic sources. The easiest way to track this increase would be via Google Analytics (though other analytics software does exist). Analytics can also pinpoint where traffic is coming from and make sure you’re doing SEO work for the keywords that are bringing in potential clients.

Site Authority Increases

Your SEO work for one keyword will also help to increase your website’s overall authority. You can monitor metrics like Moz’s Domain Authority or Majestic’s TF and CF, then they continue to rise over time. This should help other keywords—even those that may not be receiving direct work—see a rise in rankings as well, much like a rising tide raising all boats.
All this, in turn, will help us see an increase in our site traffic, as mentioned above. With the salary of the SEO specialist (payment for SEO agency) and the income increase from organic traffic, the SMB owners can calculate the ROI easily.

Summary

Out of the online marketing solution listed above, It’s hard to pick the winner with excellent ROI in short-term and long-term. Each of them has the advantage and disadvantage. Social media marketing can broadcast the brand awareness to the public, PPC has the strong return in the short-term, SEO is the best way to obtain the organic and free traffic.However, If we have to pick the best strategy about ROI, the SEO is the option as its multifaceted range of effects, permanent value, and potential for compounding returns. After all, most of the SMB owners want to build a long time business.