I absolutely detest being asked ROI on a single campaign.
I have a number. I could give a number. It’s wrong.
Because one, singular campaign does not persuade people to buy. Consumer purchase behavior is not a straight line. The decision to purchase is created from a Jenga stack of actions on the part of the brand – this ad campaign, that email sequence, this tradeshow event, that webinar. They stack on top of each other to create brand awareness and brand presence.
Each campaign you produce and every marketing action the company takes builds on the company’s brand equity. ROI – return on investment – is always cumulative, which is not how finance people like to track things. That fiscal preference does not change the fact that people buy from a brand, a company – not a one-off campaign.
Don’t get me wrong: lead tracking is important. Sales tracking is critical. Paying attention to website traffic, social media follower/engagement counts, and email open/click/unsubscribe rates are all necessary to help understand customer interest and sentiment.
None of that is ROI at the campaign level or even a single brand initiative. This is especially true in B2B marketing, where sales cycles can take 6-24 months.
I can hear some of the people that do Account Based Marketing (ABM = typically big dollar sales with limited number of strategic target accounts) saying that lead tracking will give you ROI. No. It will not. I was in market research with a Top 50 global firm for a decade and a focus group moderator for nearly as long. Trust me when I say that people’s recall of what they saw that tipped them over into purchase is both notoriously bad and also doesn’t give value to the wealth of brand information they ingested prior to the mentioned action.
What can Marketing offer to show that marketing “works” for businesses? Longitudinal tracking of web traffic trends. Qualified lead and sales review, showing growth year over year. Companies with a sustained marketing focus grow on those measures. Companies without sustained focus and effort in marketing are subject to more feast and famine sales cycles, some struggle to stay relevant.
This is why doing the basics – good SEO on your website; and regular (helpful) communication to customers and prospects, whether by email, press release, or social media – is absolutely critical to business growth. These are the foundations on which your individual ad campaigns or promotions succeed or fail.
If you just started marketing, please know that Marketing is not a spigot - that would be Sales. It is not uncommon for marketing efforts to take six to eighteen months to start to bear fruit (sales dollars). But once started, Marketing is a game-changing growth engine for your business that can be kept on auto-pilot for steady growth or easily (and often inexpensively) be scaled up to support business growth at a higher level.
Marketing as a department can also support many things that do not lead to sales ROI, but that offer infinite value to the company. Insights into customer challenges which allow you to develop a new product or service. Innovations in internal communication for better retention of current employees and stronger employer branding efforts to lure new hires. That’s just part of what a solid Marketing team can offer. The value of Marketing to your company is much more than the sum of ROI on a single campaign.
By the way, what your finance team is looking for is an ROI on a budget. I’ve said it before: a budget is not a strategy. Don’t let the finance types try to convince you otherwise. Strategy will endure for multiple budget cycles. Invest in marketing strategy to build your brand equity and stop pursuing arbitrary ROI initiatives.
Alexandria Trusov is the Global Marketing Director at Alpha Resources and a B2B marketing consultant to manufacturers and other B2B companies. Contact her at [email protected] or visit www.truinsightsconsulting.com.