{"id":9852,"date":"2025-02-25T23:27:41","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T07:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/?p=9852"},"modified":"2025-02-25T23:27:42","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T07:27:42","slug":"roi-vs-voi-smart-marketers-look-beyond-the-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/roi-vs-voi-smart-marketers-look-beyond-the-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"ROI vs. VOI: Smart Marketers Look Beyond the Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most of us default to Return on Investment (ROI)<\/strong> for measuring marketing success. It’s the tried-and-true metric that quantifies financial returns. Money in, money out. But we all know the messy reality of attribution. The prospects who subscribe and unsubscribe from our newsletters, who toss us a LinkedIn like now and then, who eventually Google us one day because they can’t remember our URL… and who then click on the Google Ad because it sits at the top of their search results. ROI alone doesn\u2019t tell the full story. Enter Value on Investment (VOI)<\/strong>\u2014a broader approach that accounts for the intangible, long-term benefits that don\u2019t always show up in a spreadsheet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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First, What Is ROI?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Return on Investment (ROI) is a financial metric used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment. The formula is straightforward:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ROI = (Profit – Investment Cost) \/ Investment Cost<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marketers often use ROI to assess campaign performance, ad spend, or lead generation efforts. If you spend $10,000 on a campaign and generate $50,000 in revenue, you would do the math of ($50,000 – $10,000) \/ $10,000 to find out that ROI is 400%. It\u2019s a clear metric that resonates with executives and finance teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That being said, it\u2019s really hard to yield ROI from guesting on a podcast. Arguably, it\u2019s even harder to attribute. Someone may have made a mental note to check out your brand when they heard you speak so eloquently on that podcast (you did great!), but their conversion occurred when they saw your Instagram ad and decided to tap on it. Doh! Misattribution.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Honestly, I think it’s mostly a waste of time to even try to track it all. There\u2019s a good chance that attribution won\u2019t be accurate<\/a>, and the time you spend on setup you lose on actually doing the marketing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Side note: if someone wants to tell me they bought a SparkToro subscription because they heard me on a podcast, I’d be pumped to properly attribute the win.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, What Is VOI?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In this new age of moving away from reliance on third-party cookies, navigating the algorithms’ suppression of links<\/a>, referral traffic slowly shrinking<\/a> across the web, and parsing through incorrect social media attribution<\/a> (remember, 100% of your TikTok referrals and 14% of your LinkedIn referrals are marked as direct!), we need to think beyond ROI. We need to look beyond dollars in, dollars out: Enter Value on Investment (VOI). VOI expands beyond immediate financial returns to include intangible, long-term business benefits. You know, all the stuff you can\u2019t see in GA4 (which, let’s be honest, is hard enough to figure out anyway).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some examples include but are not limited to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n