B2B marketers who sell technology understand that we can’t draw a straight line from an ad impression to a closed-won opportunity. As of 2019, each opportunity had a buyer committee of 8-10 people. Most opportunities over $10,000 need buy-in from the CFO now, which has introduced more friction to the buying cycle – and more personas to win over.
Because of this, our sales cycles are lengthening, which means more touch-points (the vast majority of them digital) are needed to convince a prospect to become a customer.
For those of you downloading this guide hoping for a silver bullet or single metric to convince the C-Suite and board that your marketing ROI is stellar, I have bad news – There is no silver bullet.
Boards and CEOs who attempt to measure marketing by a magic number will always be disappointed. Your success isn’t just tied to your ability to find equations to prove ROI. Your success depends on your ability to educate about the realities of marketing data.
What to Expect in CaliberMind’s Guide to Improving Marketing ROI
Here is a general overview of what you can find in our guide to improving marketing ROI:
- Setting the Scene: Learning how to set the scene to present marketing ROI data is very important, especially for CEOs who want to know for every dollar they put into marketing, how many do they get out in bookings.
- What Makes Understanding Marketing ROI So Hard (& How Do We Fix It)?: There is no silver bullet to proving stellar ROI. This is where we will fix this approach to better understand why marketing ROI is so hard to conceptualize in the first place.
You Can Lead a Horse to Water: In our experience, the most difficult executives to win over to a best-case estimate of marketing investment fall into two categories that we dive into. - Internal (Education) Campaigns: Succeeding at proving marketing ROI has everything to do with executing an internal education campaign. So you’ll want to make sure you understand this campaign very well!
- Reporting ROI: We give our best recommendations for reporting on ROI in executive meetings.
- Marketing Team Goal Setting: More and more marketing teams have variable compensation tied to pipeline and bookings goals, and we think this is a fantastic thing!
Additional Resources: See our additional resources for more help.
Check out the comprehensive guide by clicking the button below.
The Truth About Marketing ROI
The good news is that this guide is developed to help you find proxies for marketing ROI and educate those around you that every B2B marketing department is faced with multiple truths:
- The buyer journey is not linear. Personas will engage, disengage, and re-engage multiple times before ever talking to sales.
- The most critical brand engagements a marketer orchestrates are often impossible to track.
- More than 80% of the buyer journey takes place online or through peer networks – before anyone engages with sales.
- Multiple tactics are needed to stay top of mind across multiple personas- marketers can’t just get really good at one or two things and scale a business.
- Marketing doesn’t stop at a closed-won opportunity.
As a marketer, you know these truths and are thinking through how to overcome them every day. However, we often forget to educate or market to internal stakeholders along the way. Succeeding at proving marketing ROI has everything to do with executing an internal education campaign.
