Lead Consultant - EMEA & APAC
16/1/2020
The need for visibility of ROI is not a fad–it’s here to stay.
That’s because, as long as marketing spending continues to grow, revenue impact visibility will continue to be a key issue for marketers. A Forrester study notes that digital marketing spend will reach $146 billion by 2023, growing at a 9% compound annual growth rate.
While this growth in spend seems hefty (and, quantitatively, it IS!), that spend will be spread over an ever-growing number of channels and technology to ensure maximum reach. As budgets grow, so does the need to ensure results and ROI across all these new areas.
In other words: the more money is spent, the bigger the need to justify that spend.
Because of this, CMOs are feeling increasingly pressured to showcase and justify budgetary spend, and they look to data from automation tools to shape – or give a story, if you will – to their strategy results. However, data on its own isn’t the solution. Data isn’t enough: data needs to be translated into insights.
These pressures are being further compounded by the entry into many boardrooms of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), a figure with an eye towards finding ways in which businesses can grow and scale (and with the ability to enact the budget cuts to make this growth happen).
It’s no wonder, then, that visibility of revenue impact is such a central concern for CMOs, who find themselves pressed to prove that their marketing strategy does, in fact, propel wider business growth and ROI.
Given the importance of having visible ROI…
How can you make sure you are maximising the visibility of your marketing impact?
Here are three key ways to ensure that you are building visibility into your marketing strategy:
1. Show the worth of every touchpoint in your customer journey with lead attribution
Take a look at where your leads are interacting with you. These patterns will help you build an attribution model with touchpoints along the buying journey. Once you’ve identified these points, check out the levels of interaction and lead behaviour at each point. Which of these points are providing the most value to your organisation? At which points are your leads converting into sales?
Having a clear marketing attribution model will help you direct your budgets to maximise ROI across the buying journey, allowing you to allocate budget and resources where they have the greatest impact or are needed most.
Marketing automation platforms are an invaluable tool for this – not only can they help you identify your attribution touchpoints, but they can also derive a cost per lead at each stage of the journey, giving you the key stats you need to show the boardroom exactly how much they are getting, at every point, for their marketing buck.
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2. Translate data into actionable insights with reporting
It’s not enough to know how many leads and conversions you’ve netted. You can have a database full of data but, if that data can’t be interpreted and turned into actionable insights, you won’t be able to show very much ROI.
The reporting functionalities in marketing automation allow you to measure and track campaign performance at macro and micro levels. Not only will you be able to generate out-of-the-box reports, but you’ll also be able to customise reports to view successes and results by channel or events, link leads to specific marketing efforts, and connect marketing initiatives to sales outcomes.
These reports will help you draw a full picture of where your marketing spend is going and what you are getting for it – and then act on this information. Which brings us to our final point…
3. Use technology to respond to your findings
Having technology to act on your insights allows you to make changes along the buyer journey at specific points and as needed by specific leads and types of leads. Marketing automation platforms and their array of tools make it easy to act on your campaign results and correct your marketing course, so to speak.
You’ll be able to:
- See, test, and amend personalisation options
- Shift leads from one campaign to another based on their behaviour
- Create alerts for sales to jump in when leads are deemed ready to buy
By deploying these tools to adjust your marketing strategy, you’ll be able to showcase your team’s responsiveness to individual leads and marketing trends, as well as track budgetary shifts and revenue growth from these adjustments, helping you draw comparisons that show the worth of your marketing’s efforts on ROI.
Remember: you need visibility into your marketing to provide visibility out to your stakeholders.