Editorial
The Gist
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Data-driven storytelling. Educate stakeholders on marketing attribution and leverage data storytelling to demonstrate marketing ROI and justify budget decisions.
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Align with sales. Collaborate with sales teams to create unified goals, improve lead conversion and strengthen your ability to prove marketing ROI.
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Simplify attribution models. Use first-touch, multi-touch or last-touch attribution to identify key trends in campaigns, making marketing ROI easier to measure and communicate.
I frequently hear from marketers how much they struggle to demonstrate their objective value to the organization. Whether it’s a quarterly business review, a one-time inquiry on the latest campaign or a new boss who wants to see all the numbers for the past three years, leadership often has questions that marketers feel unprepared to answer. They struggle to demonstrate the value of their work and prove the marketing ROI.
While marketers might feel like they’re being put on the spot, the truth is the marketing function is no different from any other function within a company. HR, accounting, operations, IT and sales all have the same mandate to demonstrate their value to the organization.
Why Marketing ROI Feels Mysterious
The issue here is that most other functions have obvious, straightforward metrics to showcase their performance. HR can measure retention and recruiting success, IT can prove ROI with uptime or malware deflected, and the sales team has dashboards that directly track lead conversion, deal timeline, close rates and value.
It’s much harder for marketing because the landscape in which we operate is so vast and constantly changing. There are many programs, channels and campaigns all running simultaneously, and there are many different ways of reaching, engaging and converting prospects. Not to mention, conversions are rarely driven by single-source direct attribution. More often, it’s the cumulative result of a series of touchpoints and brand messaging — some which are impossible to detect or track and some which you may not even own.
Data management practices and adherence to these rules between teams add to the complexity. Did the lead already exist in the CRM? What if they were listed under a different company? What if there are duplicates? When was the last time they engaged? Does a reengagement after six months of dormancy count as a reengagement or a new first engagement? And how does all of this relate to the sales cycle? Which touchpoints or engagements seem to drive the funnel and conversions best?
Because it’s a complicated mix, getting to these answers can be extremely difficult. Every platform has its own approach to measurement, which means there’s no single source of truth. Instead, it’s a highly complex tech stack that changes frequently, and it’s hard to integrate. Adding fuel to the fire, marketing can feel the sting when sales is given credit for closing a deal because marketing just can’t quite prove that their engagement made a difference. But we all know that deal wouldn’t have existed without marketing.
Related Article: Prove Marketing ROI: 5 Important Steps for CMOs
Are You Speaking the Same Language as Your Stakeholders?
There’s also the issue that all of this assumes the CFO knows the right questions to ask. They may not understand the complexities and challenges of marketing attribution, the channel landscape or the limitations of the tools you have to work with. As a result, they could pose questions you can never fully answer — but you’re still accountable for those answers, nonetheless.
Even worse is when a new CMO or CFO comes on board, and they come with a whole new set of questions you’ve never had to answer before.
Without being able to tell that story proactively, the higher-ups and stakeholders will create the story for you. They’ll ask for specific metrics, regardless of whether they’re meaningful or whether they understand the nuance and context surrounding them.
What’s a marketer to do? How can you prove marketing ROI to those without a firm understanding of how it’s measured?
Set the Narrative With Data-Driven Storytelling
To solve the problem, marketers must own the narrative and tell the story of value with data. We must become proactive in explaining the ROI we bring to not only individual campaigns and lead generation but to the organization as a whole.
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Here are six tips for leveraging data to tell that story and bulletproof your budget with valid, indisputable results:
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Educate the audience. Start by giving leadership and stakeholders an overview of how marketing attribution works, the type of data that’s available and some of the challenges in collecting and analyzing it. Explain how it’s structured and siloed, the different platforms it lives in and how it’s sometimes challenging to link those touchpoints together into a linear customer journey. You’re not asking for sympathy; you’re educating.
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Set realistic expectations. Once you can demonstrate what data’s available, explain what it takes to turn it into the reports they’re looking for. Sure, you could pull it into a business intelligence tool if that’s what they want, but if it takes days or weeks to get that report ready, you’re now looking at the past. Timelines and audiences move too fast for that to be relevant, and the time and cost of that effort may not be worthwhile. Suggest another solution or reporting mechanism to get them the information they want without so much hassle.
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Be intentional with the data you’re collecting. Before you even kick off the next campaign, ask the CFO or other stakeholders exactly what they’re looking for so that you can build the campaign and tailor your reports in a way that gathers the correct data from the start. This is the “square peg, round hole” problem; it’s really hard to make data fit the story if you don’t know what story you’re trying to tell when you collect it. Remember that C-suite and other stakeholders may have different metrics and speak a slightly different language than marketing, so make sure you’re all on the same page before the campaign is out the door.
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Be honest about the limitations of your tools. Many organizations still rely on Excel to do deep data analytics on attribution, and that’s just unrealistic. Excel is not the right tool for this; it’s error-prone and slow. You need purpose-built tools that can help surface the insights that matter faster. This helps you stop wasting time scrolling through spreadsheets and spend more time driving leads.
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Define the attribution models you’ll use. First-touch, multi-touch or last-touch attribution? Everyone has to agree on this up front and understand that, whichever you choose, it may leave valuable information out of the analysis. The marketing qualified lead rarely takes a defined path like a monarch butterfly on migration. It’s more like a swarm of bees, floating from one flower to another, going in and out of various watering holes and interacting with their peers. Explain that this is less about one-to-one attribution and more like trendspotting; instead of a defined path, it’s more realistic that 80% of conversions had a similar pattern, so that’s the pattern we should try to emulate.
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Collaborate with sales. Remember that sales is a partner, not a customer. Marketing and sales teams rely on one another for success, and we should see a well-choreographed integration of effort. We’re all working toward the same goal, and optimizing results on both teams raises the value and ROI for everyone. This is more about creating the right culture than the right reporting, but building a successful, collaborative relationship with sales is ultimately reflected in the metrics and results you generate.
Related Article: Mastering the Art of Marketing Reporting
Building Trust in Marketing ROI With Clear Metrics
Demonstrating marketing ROI and justifying your spend doesn’t have to feel like an existential crisis. By educating your audience about attribution and its limitations, understanding their needs and the language that’s meaningful for them, and building out data collection and reports around a collaborative model of success, marketing can safeguard their budget and prove their value to the organization with less time, effort and stress.
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