CMO Roundtable with MassageLuXe's Kristen Pechacek

How is technology helping you measure the return on your marketing and ad spend?

Technology is essential to our ability to measure the return on our marketing and advertising spend in a variety of ways.

Our full-service internal marketing agency uses our custom point-of-sale software to follow clients brought in from specific marketing campaigns to continually update the ROI of campaigns in years past. We can then make informed decisions around promotional offers, budget recommendations, targeting, and ad sequencing. 

We have also worked hard to enable online sales and online bookings so that we are able to see the true impact of our marketing dollars. 

For example, through our digital advertising efforts, clients are sent to a page to purchase promotions online, which then gives us two essential key performance metrics that we use to measure effectiveness. The first is return on ad spend, which is the revenue immediately collected from the online sale. The second is long-term ROI, which accounts for the cost of the marketing, the servicing of the appointment, the immediate revenue generated, and the lifetime value of the customer. Before digital marketing, the attribution path and true return were far more challenging to uncover, which made it more difficult to encourage franchise owners to commit to a local marketing spend.

In addition to the technology that enables online promotions, we use a fair amount of technology to track the process. Franchisees are given access to dashboards where they can view their marketing performance and return. This decreases the time our team must spend hand-delivering performance to franchisees and allows for self-service marketing insights for the owners.

Technology isn’t something that we just use heavily in advertising and marketing. We also apply it to our public relations. Most PR firms are focused on pushing press releases or content and then crossing their fingers for results. We take a different approach with our PR agency, which provides a platform called 919 Insights. The strategy allows us to create blog content that uses high-ranking keywords someone might use in an Internet search to learn more about the services we provide, or what it is like to own a franchise like ours. As a result of this program, we have increased our website ranking. We even had a franchisee commit to opening a MassageLuXe after finding our brand while doing research about starting her own spa business.