By Johnson Ayo
As part of efforts to deepen its footprint in Nigeria’s digital marketing landscape, Amplify Digital Agency has kicked off its monthly knowledge-based meet-up, with the call on organizations to ensure that they carry out some form of measurement of their return on investment (ROI) objectives.
The educative event which held on Thursday, at the Workstation brought together practitioners as well as clients to share experiences and proffer solutions to some of the challenges that beleaguer the segment in the country.
According to Alexander Edem, CEO of Amplify Digital Agency the meet-up was a platform to bridge the disconnection between the money C-Suite executives approves for digital marketing agencies and the results they derive.
“We think that if marketers could deepen their knowledge of the industry and the tools that are available for use, and deepen the knowledge of the customer and their knowledge of the client, things will be better,” he said during an interview.
Poor results from investment in digital marketing have seen many executives underplay the importance of brand communication and visibility. Nevertheless, the survival of the business often depends on how well it is leveraging digital marketing channels. The 21st century customer has moved his location online hence any serious organization that does not have any form of presence online is essentially choosing not engage their clients in their new location.
There are many new digital marketing trends and strategies that are evolving in the current high-tech, internet-connected era and organizations now need to use them to succeed in their efforts to scale. In the same vein, digital marketing agencies need to upgrade their knowledge on what really works for specific situations in order to achieve maximum results. This is where the clients’ ROI becomes very critical as the agency will often have to show proof that money was well utilized and results match up to investment.
At a panel session, experts agreed that ROI does vary from one company to another. While company A may have a goal as its ROI objective, B could settle for financial returns.
“I don’t think we will ever finish the conversation, it is an ongoing discussion because ROI can only be subjective. For some companies having more customers engage with them is enough ROI, for some other people it comes down to the hard money, what was the investment and what was the profit from the investment? Different marketers have slightly different perspective to how to measure ROI.
“However, a consistent theme across is that we must measure whatever is the objective for the brand. Some measurement must be done whether it is towards a financial incentive or some form of goal. Hitherto the idea wasn’t really measurement focused but it has become important. We must put the tools and systems in place to make measurement. Anything that isn’t measured cannot scale. That is what we have seen as marketers,” Edem said.
The Think Digital meet-up holds the Thursday of every month. It is expected to last for the next one year. Amplify Digital Agency has also commenced a digital podcast called the Think Digital podcast where they invite key decision makers to come and talk about what they are facing and how to improve on that. There is a thinkdigital.ng where you have a lot of long form contents, article with deep dive analysis of the industry that could be used by practitioners as actionable insights.