The best way for marketers to show their financial contribution is to get a firm grip on the financial metrics their organization cares about most. For instance, they should be demonstrating how they’ve driven overall revenue growth, and show the measures of their success.
Here are eight ways that marketers can prove their worth.
1. Measure the Quality of Leads
ROI is tough to show for certain marketing campaigns, as there can be many factors that contribute to a campaign’s success. For example, when a campaign is live, a consumer could click on the campaign, stop short of making the desired conversion, and then return to it weeks or months later to complete the purchase.
“It can take time to show success,” said Ciara Hautau, digital marketing executive at Sparro. “Certain marketing tactics such as SEO can take up to 3-6 months to start showing any results, which can make immediate ROI reporting difficult.”
She suggests setting up a timeline for sending reports and properly measuring the quality of leads.
“If you’re heavily focused on SEO, maybe quarterly reports make more sense than weekly reports,” Hautau said. “Identify a way to measure the quality of your leads as an additional measure of ROI. Maybe that’s based on budget, the amount of items purchased, or however much they spent with your company ongoing, but it’s important to note that quality leads are key to a successful marketing campaign.”
2. Control Flow of Information:
Brandon Kovach, a digital specialist for Dynamic Digital Marketing Agency, said that it’s essential to control the flow of information so you can show exactly how many leads have turned into sales.
“One of the easiest ways of doing this is through a well-planned sales funnel,” he said. “When you can show x amount of sales, you can show a client-consistent revenue based on your marketing efforts. Marketers who blanket and mass market are missing the key to successful retention: showing proof of return on investment.”
3. Establish a Baseline:
Alexander M. Kehoe, co-founder and operations director of Caveni Digital Solutions, noted that the first step of showing results is to
to establish a baseline at the start of a contract and clearly lay out key performance indicators.
Once you can show these results, it’s easy to prove ROI.
4. Use Google Tracking Codes:
Every digital marketer should use Google tracking codes whenever possible to accurately track ROI for paid marketing efforts, according to Calloway Cook, founder of Illuminate Labs.
“Google offers a free Campaign URL Builder tool that allows marketers to set up and track campaigns,” he said. “The tool adds tracking codes to each hyperlink based on the campaign, and then the data filters into Google Analytics. It shows traffic and conversions per campaign, which is essential for demonstrating value as a digital marketer. If you can clearly show that your paid placements are generating more revenue than you’re spending on them, you’re in a great position.”
5. Show Tangible Numbers:
Adam Hempenstall, founder and CEO at Better Proposals, noted that CEOs don’t generally appreciate terms such as impressions, organic traffic, likes, etc., which is why tangible numbers are a must.
“To truly impress your managers and CEOs, show them direct ROI—how much they’ve been able to earn from each of your activities,” he said. “You can use a simple Google Analytics report and get a graph done, but in the end, you can show it as a single number. For example, the ROI of email marketing in the past quarter was 20x—so for every dollar spent, we earned 20.”
6. Benchmarking:
GRIN’s CEO & co-founder, Brandon Brown, noted that proving financial results in marketing requires benchmarking return on spend across all channels.
“You need to get the best attribution in place that you can and then pump that data into a BI tool like Looker to measure direct return on spend across those channels,” he said. “For channels where attribution is harder, like influencer marketing or app stores where there are a lot of dark conversions, you will want to measure ‘organic uplift.’”
Additionally, it’s important to track baseline sales over time, track campaigns, spend heavily and attribute what you can.
“Measure the difference in organic and dark revenue or installs against your baseline,” Brown said. “From there, add some logical percentage into a blended return on spend or CAC.”
7. Set up 800 Numbers:
A great way to show value is by utilizing dedicated 800 numbers for each marketing campaign, as two of the most important pieces of data for ROI are how many calls each marketing campaign generated, and the rate at which they were converted.
“For five different landing pages or five different TV commercials, have five different phone numbers,” said Morgan Taylor, CMO and financial advisor for LetMeBank. “It’s an easy metric to measure, and then use a phone tracking system like Kall8 so that you can track your call data. Have it tie to your CRM and push the phone data right in.”
8. Know your numbers:
Nikki Bisel, owner and founder at Seafoam Media, said that it’s hard to draw a straight line between marketing efforts and the financial payoff for a business. However, if you know a few numbers, you can make pretty good estimates.
“You should know your average customer value, marketing reach (these are numbers like search impressions, ad impressions, TV viewers, etc.), your engagement rate (numbers like clicks/website views, add to carts, and online chats), your lead conversion rate (contact form submissions and direct sales inquiries), and your close rate (of your leads, what number of them turn into actual paying customers?),” she said. “Once you know those numbers, you can create a simple equation that’ll estimate the sales generated from your marketing efforts.
We hope that these 8 ways have shown you how to get a firm grip on the financial metrics that every organization today usually cares most about. Take your pick of the most relevant ways and start proving that your marketing tactics are measurable, substantial, and beneficial to your company.