And, to conclude our series: Myth #4 – Analyzing campaign and marketing ROI is not worth the effort required. Reality check – any metrics that provide you actionable insight to improve performance is worth it.
Remember, you are looking for trend points to make educated bets on campaign optimization. Ultimately, the demand generation team that can demonstrate and confidently predict, in terms of revenue, what happens when they spend a single marketing dollar earns the right to ask for increased budgets and resources. Data points actually give you the confidence to try new campaign approaches, test messaging, and focus on ways to sustain and build long-term relationships.
Automation and systems integration can sure make the entire process less time consuming and may even increase accuracy. These elements, however, are certainly not required. As long as your lead capture systems are getting what you need to report on in the front end – then you can always export the pipeline data from your CRM systems and, with your sales team, tie the data points together – it just takes more time and effort. Once your process is documented and in place, automation and integration can really help to facilitate time to results. And, integration between sales and marketing systems helps facilitate building detailed reports and dashboards that both organizations can believe in.
All metrics need to be considered within the larger context. Your marketing ROI should facilitate the right set of conversations around what is working, what is not, so that you can make identify what to test and optimize. And, once you have a baseline of performance metrics over a period of time, then you can set goals to decrease cost per conversion and increase conversion ratios to realize year over year improvement in marketing campaign performance.
Get started today. Clearly benchmark what your campaign conversion ratios look like on average. You will need to define “conversion” for your organization and the types of campaigns you are running. But, define it nonetheless and document what your baseline is today. Next, benchmark where you are in terms of ability to influence revenue. How you define “influence” will be largely determined by that attribution method that you have adopted. And, if you do not know what the total influence really is – your benchmark today is 0%. The good news – it should be easy to improve upon if you can get your measruement definitions and processes in place! Then, as you adopt more sophisticated campaigning techniques – you can start to really deomonstrate marketing effectiveness improvement. Wouldn’t you like to show trend lines like the following image?
- Demonstrating Marketing Effectiveness Improvement
[...] Many marketers are still struggling with key metrics and demonstrating ROI. Yes, it is a controversial subject in terms of the HOW, but I think that a clear understanding of Campaign impact on revenue is still a [...]