How to Calculate ROI in Marketing It's a brand new month, everyone! It's a time for new beginnings. New email campaigns, blog posts, and social media strategies are on the horizon. But, aren't we forgetting something? With last month's activities done, we need to pause for a second to examine what worked and what didn't. You can't do that just by saying last month's activities were "great" — because "great" doesn't pay the bills. If you can prove that your marketing activities actually made an impact on your business, you'll have many more opportunities at your disposal. More budget to play with, potential hires to bring on board, and more ideas to put in action. Sounds like every marketer's dream, right? So how do you go about first, finding the right metrics to use, and second, proving your marketing's ROI to your boss? Why, with a monthly marketing report template, of course. Download our completely revamped PowerPoint and Excel templates by clicking here, Keep reading to learn how you can calculate your ROI in marketing through Excel, and use them in real life. For example, if you've been running a $800 campaign for three months, and you're seeing a average sales growth of 5% per month and $10000 sales growth from the previous month, then your ROI calculation can assess that trend: (10000 - (.05*10000) - 800)/800 Additionally, if you're a HubSpot customer, you can access an ROI calculator programmed with the same formula in our...

Waterfall Charts: The Marketing Graph You Need to Hit Your Goals Last November, my husband and I were on our honeymoon in Maui. One of the main activities we wanted to do was a hiking tour near the waterfalls. We dreamt of swimming in the cascading water at sunrise. When you hear the word “waterfall,” that’s typically what you imagine. However, today, we're going to talk about a different kind of waterfall — the waterfall chart. Waterfall charts are a data visualization resource that can help you gather and track important data such as traffic goals and lead generation. Below, let's review what a waterfall chart is, how to read one, and how to create one. In marketing, a waterfall chart could display the number of leads, traffic sources, or blog views over a period of time. More specifically, you could use a waterfall chart to showcase how your blog traffic has increased or decreased in the last year, giving values month over month. You could potentially use line charts, bar charts, and even bullet graphs to show this type of data. But waterfall charts have the advantage of showing your gains as they’re impacted by losses over time. Why use a waterfall chart? You should use a waterfall chart instead of other types of charts when trying to visualize data that experiences both gains and losses. It’s especially useful if you want to see how a loss affects a subsequent value. One of the reasons that waterfall...