Marketing ROI: The best way to get leadership to listen to you

Many marketing professionals struggle communicating their works value.

That’s not just us saying that. That’s according to multiple surveys. For example, Deloitte surveyed CMOs across industries. According to them, 43% of respondents said demonstrating the value of their marketing activities is a top challenge. Even if you can demonstrate it, you’ll need to communicate it, which is a whole other beast.

At the end of the day, we all just want to confidently go in front of our boss and say, “This is what you get with this money. If you give us more money, we can do even more.”

So, how do we do that?

How can we set up our marketing campaign not just for success but to generate even more investment?

To show you how, we’ll go through three very different marketing campaigns.

Every Marketing Campaign Starts with a Problem.

Kidlin's Law says that if you write the problem down clearly, then the problem is already half-solved. The same goes for marketing. To measure success, we have to define success, which means we must first understand the problem.

Poseidon Racks provides storage solutions for water sports equipment. You would think that summer would be their busiest season. But it wasn’t. They did not notice any spikes in sales as summer approached. So they need to optimize their summer sales cycle.

That’s the problem, but how do you optimize a sales cycle? Well, you do so by increasing visibility, website conversion rates, and average order value. So we already have three metrics to measure.

You could measure visibility with website traffic, but that doesn’t tell you a whole lot. There could be an increase in traffic, but not in sales. So sales is a better key performance indicator (KPI).

When we applied our strategy to Poseidon Racks, they achieved unprecedented summer sales and a scalable framework for future seasonal promotions. That last part is the cherry on top. Increasing sales season over season shows sustainable growth, not just a one-time spike.

Poseidon Racks’ Results:

186% Increase in sales season over season

141% Increase in Orders

35% Increase in Website Conversion Rate

15.5% Increase in Average Order Value.

Turning the Vague Idea of Success into Hard Data that Proves Success.

Measuring sales is easy. But what about the success of something vague and nebulous, like branding?

Franciscus Homes is a regional new home builder. They wanted to promote their newest community, The Villages at Bartlett Station, in a way that stood out from the competition. They needed our help creating a unique brand and a go-to-market strategy.

So, how do you measure the success of something like that? Firstly, the end goal is to ultimately sell houses. But the goal of branding is to get attention. So, how do you measure attention?

We measured branding success through the number of people who attended the grand opening and the number of appointments set. In this context, an appointment is when a potential buyer sets up a time to meet with home sellers.

Over 250 Grand Opening Attendees

Over 750 Appointments set

We could have just measured our success by homes sold. But without the context of appointments and attendees, there would be no way to connect home sales to our work.

If you’re curious about the details, read the whole story here.

However, we also achieved an accolade. Perhaps the greatest indicator of success is when someone else notices your success. The Villages at Bartlett Station became the best-selling new homes community in Hampton Roads 3 years in a row. So, of course, we’re going to show that off whenever we can.

Turning Metrics into What Leadership Wants to Hear.

The boss cares about their bottom line above all else. While our metrics so far do demonstrate success, the key to communicating success is to relate those metrics to something they care about. In this case, return on investment (ROI).

Fear Not Tarantulas, one of the leading online pet shops in the U.S., specializes in selling a wide variety of live spiders. We worked with them to optimize their spending on Google and social media ads.

We could have just focused on total sales generated, but we needed to relate it back to the investment. So we used Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). It refers to the amount of revenue that is earned for every dollar spent on a marketing campaign. It is basically a hyper-focused form of ROI.

14.70 Google AD Roas.

13.98 Paid Social Roas.

So that means for every dollar they spent on us, they earned around $14 in revenue.

However, we can take it even further and give them an even better holistic metric. Blended Cost Per Sale (CPA for Cost Per Acquisition) measures the average cost of acquiring a new customer across all marketing channels. It “blends” together all direct and indirect costs, like labor and overhead.

We achieved a Blended CPA of $5.25. That KPI empowers leadership to easily and effectively plan out their next marketing budget. If they want to grow by 10,000 customers, they know it will cost them $52,500. You’re making the math (and by extension, the decision) very easy for your boss.

Metrics are great, but they mean nothing if they don’t relate back to your goals and bottom line.

So, if you want metrics that will earn you more investment, you’ll need to put them in context, relate them to the end goal, and explain how they reinforce the bottom line.