Now, let me show you in real life how you can apply this formula to calculate the return on marketing investment for not an extraordinary expense like Kim's, but for an ordinary expense like the one that you might see every day. I want to thank Rutgers here, because they gave me permission to use this case study. As a matter of fact, this case study actually was shortlisted for an award because it's ordinary, but it measures something people didn't realize was measurable, ROMI. Let me tell you what happened. About a year ago, Rutgers launched a new course. This course happened to be called mini MBA course. If you get credits then you can apply towards an MBA, or you can get a certificate. But it focused on supply chains in a digital network. Brand new course. Never been held before. But we used the Influencer Marketing Techniques that I've talked about here and I put together a program for them. It turns out, we knew what the benefit was, the revenue generated from one student taking this course was $4,995, or close to $5,000. The cost of the program, that we put together, was ordinary. It was $2,497 or about $2500 Bucks, or about half of what it would cost to generate one incremental student. That formula by the way, you can use too. In words, think about this. We're trying to figure out how to get a return on marketing investment. How much do you spend? Well, what is it going to generate? Instead of having to beg for a budget, you now have a situation here where you can cross-justify your budget. So, we did the kinds of things that we talked about in this course. We reached out to an influential blog that we had identified. There was a specialist in supply chain, kinds of issues. Why? Because those are the kind of students we were trying to reach, and we said, "Can we get you some information?" and it turned out the editor of the blog said, ''Well, yeah I'll even take a guest post from one of the Rutgers staff", and this was his exchange for us, "-if you can get some new data from the Gartner Group and can include that in the report, because they've got credibility in the supply chain area, and if you want to support your case for why you're holding this course, why it's an important one to take, I want to see some independent data from them." So, we had to go to the Gartner group. We said, "Look, if we're trying to put together a post for this influential supply chain blog, where we've got a new Rutgers course. Can we get the data?" It took us about two business days before they said, "Yeah, we'll give me some data. Yeah, you can quote it in your blog post, you've got approval." We turn back to the editor, we got a post. So, it took a little process, it took a little time, but we got one post. But the post which was authored by one of the records faculty had a tracking link in it. Why? We were writing it, we could put the link in. So, we knew what kind of visitors, if they came, what they did. We could track them all the way through to, did any of them become students. Now, we had a second contact. This one was from a journalist. The journalist had actually seen the blog post. So, that's how influencers work. The journalist said, "Well, I'd like to do a story on that too, partly because the course hasn't been held yet. So, this is still a relatively new trend, and this is a course that hasn't been held before. I'd like to interview one of your faculty who's teaching the course, because that's the angle I want to go into." Well, we could have offered them a number of different members of the faculty to interview, but we happened to pick Glenn Gilmore. Why? Because Glenn is an influencer. Glenn understands how this process works. So again, we set up the interview. EBM ran the story. We were not able to get tracking links into the story, but because EBM is a notable news media. You can see that data, it just comes in a little different part of Google Analytics. It's called Refers. But any traffic that comes through from a particular source like EBM, can be tracked too even if it doesn't have a tracking link. Okay. So, we now have two sources, and here's the magic. We issued a press release. Now, we wrote a press release. We optimize the press release so that it would get top rankings. As you can see here in this example. If somebody searched for Rutgers Business School, and you look at the results. Wow, our press release and a photo that was with it ranked number one. A press release in Google News. That's right. Most people don't realize that Google News not only pulls from the usual suspects but the news media. One of the other sources in there are the major wire services like, business wire up here, news wire. We were using business wire in this case. We were able to of course, put tracking links in our own press release. So, we not only know how many people read the release but we know how many people clicked on one of the links in the release. In fact, we know 27 people clicked on the link that would take them to the course itself, Mini MBA supply chain and digitize network. That was great. But later in the release, we also had to regular call to action applied today. We know 22 people clicked on that link. Why? Because that tracking technique that I showed you using the campaign URL builder let's you know, even if there's more than one link in a source, where the traffic came from. We also know because those kind of tracking comes along with business wire, that we got 22 Social Mentions. Now, what's a Social Mention? Well, It got tweeted or it got shared in Facebook. In other words, people reading the release shared it 22 times and we know what phrase they were using when they shared it. We know 17 people shared it built around the Rutgers Business School offers a mini MBA program. So it's a generic concept, but 17 people shared that. Four people shared information, because it was about supply chain. All that's useful data. But it also is an interesting surprise that most people aren't aware of. Let me share this with you explicitly. Most people do not think that the people who read press releases, well they have a lot of sort of mystery or theories like, aren't those students, or interns, or who in their right mind would read a press release. Okay. I understand it. I'm an old PR guy. So we're chopped liver. The audience that might be interested in the information that we're communicating couldn't be particularly valuable. The only thing that's valuable would be journalists. Right? Well, think about this. Who in their right mind would read a press release? Well, some of them are journalists, some of them are bloggers, some of them are social media influencers who are taking that information and sharing it with their networks. Oh my God! Who would know that somebody reading a press release might have some value? Yeah. That's one of the secrets that we've uncovered by using tracking links. The benefit? Here's the benefit. This is one of the reasons why we were shortlisted for this award. That's a pretty ordinary program. That's a program you can run any month of the year. We generated six registrations. Now, other people came into the course through other routes, so we didn't like to pack the course. But six of those students got there because of this program, that generated close to $30,000 in revenue. Oh! By the way, if you remember the program only cost less than $2,500 to put together. Using the formula that we've just shared with you, that we shared in the Kim Kardashian example, you do the same thing. There's $30,000 of revenue. Let's estimate again. Just picking a SWAG, scientific wild-ass guess, that maybe the margins on this course of 50 percent. I don't know, but that some number I'm guessing, and you subtract the amount of money that was spent on the program, divided by the amount of money that was spent on the program. You get an ROMI. Not of one, but of five. In other words, we actually generated a whole amount than that, in terms of revenue. But in terms of profit to the Rutgers Business School, we generated $5 of profit for every dollar we spent on the program. Again, that's the beginning of what I'm going to say is the transformation of marketing from a necessary evil of an expense, it's costly. It's the first thing you're cutting it down trying to- Excuse me, it generates five times more profit than it cost. Do I have any other programs that are even coming close to that? Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. That's the value. So, at this point, we're going to take a quiz as we do at the end of mini lessons. In this quiz, it's going to be focused on calculating your return on marketing investment for different programs. So I apologize. There's going to be some mathematics involved. It's okay, if you use a pocket calculator. That's all right, or in your computer, I'm sure there is a calculator tool that you can get for free. That's all right. What I want to make sure is that you understand this whole approach to calculating the return on marketing investment, because again this transforms what we're talking about. This is not just a smart way to market. This is a profitable way to market, and what does that get people's attention real fast.
