Solving The Challenge of Marketing ROI

For decades, marketers have hidden behind the tacit acceptance that “half of the marketing we do is effective, we just don’t know which half.” While John Wanamaker was specifically referring to advertising all those years ago, we know this challenge applies to all the marketing channels we use in in today’s digital, social, and mobile-connected world.

Surveys like this one show that measuring marketing ROI is the top concern for marketers and CMOs.  That same study found that 71% of advertising campaigns fail to meet expectations.  And 96% of digital marketers admitted that their advertising was a waste of money.

The pressure from CEOs and boards will only increase, as they demand to see marketing investments produce business results and a measurable return. Marketers need to highlight the value we bring to our organizations and present marketing as a strategic financial asset, with strategic business value that executives can understand in their own terms.

Solving the challenge of Marketing ROI does not have to be rocket science. The first step is simply in committing to measuring it. In this article we’ll cover the challenges, considerations, and approaches you can take right now to solve the marketing ROI challenge.

Marketing ROI Challenges

Many marketers struggle with marketing ROI due to following reasons:

• Time: The process seems overwhelming when you consider all the channels, content, and agencies that support marketing efforts.
• Data and Tools: How will we collect the data and what tools do we need to get the job done?
• Skills: Analytics, Finance and Accounting are the not the strongest skill sets for many traditional marketers. The mad-men days are over as analytics is now a key skill for marketers to possess.
• Approach: What’s the best or easiest way to calculate ROI for your business?

Overcoming these challenges does not require an MBA in Finance, huge investments in technology, or a whole new team.

Solving The Marketing ROI Challenge With “Simple ROI”

Can your business answer the question: “what’s the ROI of your Marketing?”

Warning! Math ahead: The answer is as simple as measuring revenue generated from marketing activities, less the investment you made to generate that revenue, and divided by the investment.

Now I am not a math expert. (In fact, I became an English Literature major in college after taking Finance and Accounting 101 courses.)

But even I can see that what’s interesting about this simple calculation, is that investment shows up twice. This means that for the majority of organizations, all you have to do is get more results from the same budget. Or get the same results with less budget.

This involves making trade-off calculations. And it means canceling programs that don’t produce a measurable return.

How are those banner ads working out for you? What about the sales brochures your team spend a ton of money creating?

If you can’t measure the return on marketing activities, simply stop investing in them.

8 Steps To Marketing ROI — Approaches and Considerations

So you’ve committed to measuring and presenting ROI for your marketing activities. How do you get started? 

1. Take a “simple ROI” approach for your entire team by identifying and including all “variable costs” such as media spend (advertising), and agency costs, as well as “fixed costs” such as salaries plus benefits and technology investments.
2. Then use marketing-generated revenue to calculate overall Marketing ROI. Present this to the CEO and show him that Marketing has strategic value and is tied to the larger business objectives. Track and present overall Marketing ROI at each board meeting, and then optimize your marketing activities that produce the best return.
3. Analyze campaign-level ROI. Here again, I recommend taking the simple approach. Measure the return of each program you run based on only the variable campaign investments of increased creative, content, media and agency expenses. And then approach every campaign with the same “simple” lens.
4. The alternative is to apply a percentage of the fixed costs (salary, benefits, technology) to every campaign but this adds complexity that can be burdensome. For example, do you include corporate expenses? I think it’s important to understand that ROI measures are different from Financial statements and P&Ls which should include all fixed and variable costs. Still stuck?
5. Partner with your finance and accounting colleagues. They can help with complicated formulas such as “hurdle rates,” NPV (Net Present Value), and IRR (Internal Rate of Return) when considering investments in various marketing activities. The variables they use should also be included in analyzing ROI after a campaign has run. Get their support and alignment as you present to the management team.
6. Consider time-frames. Marketing results don’t happen overnight. And many campaigns from last year might continue generating results this year and next. My advice is to look at your average deal cycles. If it takes your customers 6 months to navigate their buyer journey to a purchase, then look at an even longer timeframe for Marketing ROI.
7. Tools and technology can be used to help. CRM systems have become ubiquitous and mandatory technology for modern marketers. Make sure every campaign has a tracking code, measures some results that can be quantified (leads if not revenue). And if you can, ask your team to include variable budgets in your CRM system.
8. Some research suggests that the average buyer touches 10-20 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. “Multi-Touch Attribution” can help assign value across multiple campaigns. This may require some special tools and skills, but some common approaches are “first-touch” (assigning all value to the first campaign that touches a buyer), “last touch,” or “weighted” where some level of attribution is applied across all marketing campaigns that touch the buyer.

Marketing Investments With Compounding Rates of Return

The best way to demonstrate marketing ROI: Stick to programs you can measure. What’s the ROI of logos on a famous golfer’s hat? I have no idea.

Digital Content Marketing programs are financial assets with real value that you can prove!

Content marketing is about acting like a publisher and sharing your expertise on a digital property you own.

If you track the sales and leads from these platforms, you will see a compounding rate of return from marketing, much like your 401K retirement account. See this example: 

ROI is not a perfect science for marketing. The biggest challenge is committing to measure it in the first place. Then use it in making budget and investment decisions.

Because the “investment” part of the equation is so important, just stopping the marketing activities that don’t provide a measurable return is often the easiest way to improve your Marketing ROI. Then invest that “found” money into content marketing and other digital programs you can measure and optimize. 

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Michael Brenner is the CEO of Marketing Insider Group, and co-author of The Content Formula, former Head of Strategy for NewsCred, and former VP of Content Marketing from SAP. Michael is recognized as a Top Business, Content, and Social Media Marketer.

Michael is a passionate evangelist for customer-centric marketing that drives real business results. He is also an accomplished Marketing Speaker, and a frequent contributor on leading publications like Forbes, The Economist, The Guardian, and Entrepreneur. @BrennerMichael