Businesses depend on measurable ROI to determine the viability of any investment.
A recent survey of B2B marketers found that nearly 50% of the surveyed participants found it difficult to attribute revenue growth to specific marketing activities. Not surprisingly, an increasing number of organisations have been putting pressure on their marketing and operations teams to track the return on their investments better.
Increasing ROI is however not just a measure of higher revenue per pound spend. It can also come from sustaining revenue with a lower pound spend.
In this article, we will take a look at some of technology investments that can help organisations either boost their revenue for the money spent, or lower their operational expenses without compromising on revenue.
Moving to the cloud
Many organisations, especially those in industries like manufacturing and legal services, still make use of paper to document and archive critical business data.
One study found that an organisation that would need 5 million sheets of paper each year would spend nearly $140,000 in production and archiving.
On the contrary, going paperless could help the company bring this expense down to less than a thousand dollars per year. That’s a fantastic jump in ROI with minimal capital expenses.
Cutting down on advertising
Modern advertising channels like PPC can deliver accurate ROI on each of your campaigns. However, they are still an expensive option to acquire users.
Inbound marketing techniques like content marketing, email marketing and social media marketing are organic and help businesses bring a steady stream of customers over the long term.
One three year study of PPC and content marketing found that the latter delivered nearly 2.5 times more traffic compared to pay per click advertising.
Digital asset management
You will be hard pressed to find an organisation that does not make use of digital tools like MS Office or Outlook for team collaboration. But despite the availability of this technology, businesses continue to face loss in productivity because of improper organisation.
It’s not uncommon for employees to lose several hours each month reworking their documents or presentations because they were based off older document versions.
Digital asset management is the process of bringing together all team documents in one place so that workers are aware of the latest versions of every document.
Digital asset management can save hundreds of billed hours each month which can dramatically improve productivity and consequently a business’s ROI.
Telecommuting and BYOD
Online collaboration tools have made it extremely easy for employees to work together on projects without having to meet face to face.
Investing in online project management could thus help your organisation bring down operational expenses like office space by allowing your employees to work from the comfort of their home. Studies suggest that employees are more productive when they work from home.
Such a policy also helps you go beyond the limited talent pool available in your city by bringing in skilled workers from other parts of the country or the world to work on your projects.
In addition to this, a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy is also highly profitable since it lets employees work on devices that they are comfortable with while bringing down the expenses tied to hardware purchase.
The tech investments suggested above tend to have a compounding effect on your ROI and can have long-term impact on your organisation’s bottom line. Identifying cost centres and working on ways to reduce expenses should be a continuous process that can improve the profitability and competitiveness of an organisation.
