ROI & Reporting

ROI and reporting – why it matters now

Marketing technology spend has remained nearly steady in the last three years, according to Gartner’s CMO Survey Spend 2019-20. As a result, marketing teams continue to spend at least a quarter of their budgets on technology and on labour – both of which they need to back up when they face the boardroom to explain their marketing spend and show return on marketing investment.

And there’s the problem: measuring marketing ROI is very challenging. Here are just a few stats to illustrate how marketing teams view their capability to view and demonstrate ROI:

76% of marketing leaders cite that data and analytics motivate their key decisions (source)
We also know that 60% of marketers feel the pressure to prove their ROI and marketing impact (no wonder, given that marketing budgets account for 10%, on average, of the business’s overall budget) (source)
Only 27% of CMOs feel confident reporting on their ROI (source)

We take marketing reporting seriously because accurate reporting on your key metrics can help you communicate your success, leverage buy-in across your organisation and, more importantly, plan for even better results in the future. That’s why we’ll set up your marketing automation platform to follow the key metrics that best track and measure your team’s successes.

Moving towards demonstrable ROI and reporting

CMOs need to move beyond reporting on campaigns and move towards reporting on all their spend across all their channels. Marketing automation platforms like Marketo enable marketers to obtain, analyze, and understand the data generated by their marketing efforts in order to drive more leads and close more sales – which, in the end, is what we all want!

Campaign performance reporting

Our experts can help build out your reporting with Marketo’s Revenue cycle analytics in 6 key areas: opportunity influence analyser, program analytics, email analytics, revenue tools, revenue cycle models and revenue cycle explorer.

What does this offer you? You’ll have an active view of campaign performance covering metrics such as conversion actions, click through rate, google ad performance, social media performance, engagement metrics, bounce rate, and ad click rates. This will allow you to see what’s working for you so you can replicate it in future campaigns and build stronger campaigns and channels for your marketing activities.

Lead velocity and reporting

It’s all well and good having lots of leads in the marketing funnel and rattling off a list of new leads, but the real indicator of your future revenue growth is lead velocity: how quickly your number of qualified leads progresses through the marketing funnel.

By establishing reporting on your lead velocity, you’ll be able to:

View how long your qualified leads remain in each stage of the buyer’s journey so you can optimise content and messaging – in both real-time and month-to-month
Get real-time reporting on the amount of time between lead generation and lead conversion so you can optimise your sales cycle
Align your marketing and sales teams to improve processes, driving sales performance and sales growth

By calculating your lead velocity rate – and then reporting and analysing your leads in real time – you’ll be better able to predict future revenues, going beyond revenue growth per month or quarter and giving a more accurate ROI calculation based on your actual pipeline to back your marketing strategy.

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Lead attribution models

Conversations between sales and marketing are always tricky to navigate. One way to make them easier is to determine how credit for sales and conversion is assigned to touchpoints in conversion paths across your marketing campaigns and channels so all your teams can see the revenue generated by their activities.

Lead attribution models are a way of finding out which touch points your customers interact with before they make a decision to purchase from your business. By knowing where each interaction happens, you’ll get a better picture of how customers are responding to your digital marketing and and discover where your marketing funnel is working best – and where you need to improve it.

There is a wide range of models to choose from, all of which assign credit for the purchase or conversion on a different touchpoint or set of touchpoints. The correct attribution model enables marketers to calculate the ROI of their strategy better – and this is why 39% of businesses are using some kind of attribution modeling.

For these models to work, your attribution model needs to be carefully mapped to your touchpoints (across all your marketing channels – from website to social media to paid searches, ads, and organic searches), customer journeys and sales cycle. That’s why we always recommend setting up a multi-touch model that can assign credit based on the varying conversion paths of your leads through their buyer journeys.

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Revenue modeler

Align your lead lifecycle and drive faster conversions with the revenue cycle modeler, one of Marketo’s most powerful tools. This feature allows you to see how your leads move as they progress in the marketing funnel and through the sales cycle, enabling funnel reporting of qualified leads across all campaigns and all channels.

With the Marketo revenue modeler, you’ll benefit by:

Mapping out the stages of the lead lifecycle so you can provide leads with targeted, valuable content no matter their stage of sales readiness
Ensuring leads are passed back and forth from marketing to sales and back again to ensure all your teams can respond to leads at the appropriate stage in the customer lifecycle
Aligning your sales and marketing teams and processes better to meet your business’s strategic objectives

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Dashboard setup

Forget having to dig around for data and defining the parameters for a report each time you run it. With Marketo’s dashboard setup, you can get a full overview of how well your marketing channels and campaigns are performing using quality metrics (like opportunities, closed-won revenue, and pipeline).

Setting up your dashboard to report on what you need to measure will allow you to quickly and easily turn your Marketo data into actionable insights that you can then act upon with your marketing automation capabilities:

Share and save reports
Get an overview of patterns and trends
Optimise your channel usage
Prove your marketing ROI

Multi-touch attribution campaigns

One of the key reasons why marketers struggle to measure channel performance and reflect the impact of all their efforts on revenue is their attribution modeling: namely, their attribution modelling and reporting only provides insight on one single touchpoint in the buyer journey.

Marketers need to look across all their touchpoints to get a full veiw of their marketing channel performance, and a custom multitouch attribution model is the best way to ensure this level of visibility. With a multi-touch model, you’ll be able to:

Assign credit to all touchpoints and channels (from inbound and outbound channels to events and webinars through to social media)
See the complete user journey, including all touchpoints
Save time and effort in reporting
Use machine-learning to customise attribution, better inform their marketing strategies, and provide accurate insight into future sales revenues

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