Marketing campaigns are crucial activities for businesses of any size. After all, the ultimate purpose is to generate and increase brand awareness and drive sales for the company. However, marketing activity costs money. And for marketing leaders, proving the cost is worth it is critical. This return on investment (ROI) has become a non-negotiable metric to track.
But, for B2B environments, where sales cycles are often lengthy and involve various touchpoints and decision makers, how do you prove that your marketing efforts are actually paying off? There are a few ways you can demonstrate how your campaigns are contributing to lead generation, pipeline growth, and closed deals. Here, we’ll go through the tools and strategies that can help you prove your marketing ROI.
Why Should You Prove ROI?
C-suite executives need to know where funds are going — and what’s coming in. It’s crucial to see which marketing efforts are directly translating into revenue, and which campaigns are delivering qualified marketing leads.
For example, if after a specific campaign you noticed a large increase in sales, you would assume the campaign was successful. However, knowing which specific component or touchpoint of the campaign contributed to the most revenue allows you to optimise future campaigns, putting more budget behind the specific strategies and channels that perform the best.
Being able to prove your marketing ROI also makes it easier for C-suite executives to better understand how marketing budgets are translating into revenue, through tangible financial outcomes. This means it’s easier to see:
- Which specific campaigns or channels generate conversions.
- The cost and value of specific marketing activities.
- How marketing contributes to the sales pipeline.
For example, marketing statistics show that podcasts are best when it comes to lead generation, with 77% of marketers agreeing that podcasts generate the most leads. With this in mind, shifting your budget to focus on podcast creation could be one way to boost your marketing ROI.
Challenges of proving marketing ROI
Proving your return on marketing spend can be difficult. Here, we’ll run through the main problems:
1. Difficulty tracking the buyers journey across channels
The buying journey has changed — especially within B2B spaces. Now, there are several people involved with any buying decisions, with up to 67% of the journey being done online. The rise in internet shopping also gives way to more research. Up to 70% of B2B buyers conduct thorough online research before reaching out to sales teams, making the research part of the buyer journey.
Due to the number of people involved in the buying process and the research conducted online, there are a huge number of touchpoints between initial awareness and the final sale. This makes it even more difficult to properly track the buyer journey across these touchpoints, creating the challenge of quantifying each touchpoint’s role in the final sale.
This is where cross-channel attribution tools come into play. Customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platforms can help to bridge this gap, but require dedicated teams and coordination between departments.
2. Complex attribution from long sales cycles
B2B sales cycles are typically longer than any other cycle. It’s been reported that it can take, on average, 27 touchpoints and 102 days to close a B2B deal. This means that your marketing and sales teams need to be in communication with prospective leads for a lengthy period of time before you notice any revenue.
This elongated timeline brings unique problems:
- Attribution delay: Early touches may be forgotten about or even deprioritised in favour of the final touchpoint that led to the conversion.
- Data fragmentation: As the lead progresses, data may be siloed across different platforms and tools, including marketing automation and CRM systems. This makes attribution analysis difficult.
You can attempt to solve this through evenly sharing the credit through various touchpoints. However, selecting and implementing the right attribution model can be difficult.
3. Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities
To accurately measure ROI, you need more than a basic dashboard. It’s crucial that you use advanced analytics capabilities in order to better understand engagement. This involves gathering data from a variety of sources, which is easier said than done.
How to Prove Marketing ROI
In spite of the challenges highlighted, proving marketing ROI is entirely achievable with the right strategy.
1. Define clear objectives and KPIs
Before you launch any campaign, it’s a good idea to clearly define what success will look like. You should think about the broad business objectives and goals. The most common KPIs are:
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
- Cost per Lead (CPL)
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Marketing-sourced revenue
- Lead-to-customer conversion rates
It’s a good idea to ensure that every campaign is tied to at least one of these metrics.
2. Implement clear tracking infrastructure
Tools like UTM parameters, cookies, CRM integrations, and marketing automation platforms allow you to better capture data throughout the customer journey. These include:
- Implementing conversion tracking within platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn.
- Including pixel tracking for remarketing and retargeting.
- Integrating marketing tools with your CRM to ensure lead and campaign data flow seamlessly.
3. Choosing the right attribution model
As mentioned above, it’s important to choose the right attribution model. There are a few to choose from, and there is no ‘right’ way to do this. Think about your sales cycle and the customer journey when selecting the model for you. You can choose between:
- First-touch attribution: This gives credit to the first interaction between customer and brand.
- Last-touch attribution: This attributes conversion to the final touchpoint before the sale.
- Linear attribution: This distributes credit equally across all touchpoints.
- Time-decay attribution: This gives more weight to recent interactions.
- Algorithmic attribution: AI is utilised to determine the weight of each interaction, attributing each touchpoint accordingly.
4. Align marketing and sales data
Ensure consistent data hygiene and collaboration between marketing and sales teams. When marketing hands over a lead, it should be tracked all the way to revenue generation. You should create ‘feedback loops’ to better understand:
- Which leads convert?
- What content or campaigns resonate the most?
- How long it takes to move leads through the funnel.
This strategic alignment is critical to building accurate ROI models.
5. Leverage analytics tools
Tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Google Looker can help visualize complex data and uncover insights. Consider building dashboards that show:
- Campaign performance over time.
- Lead conversion rates by source.
- Revenue attribution by channel or initiative.
Think about using predictive analytics to estimate future ROI based on past campaign data, helping guide investment decisions.
Generating ROI in B2B Companies
For B2B companies, being able to justify your marketing spend is crucial. You need to see the results in order to better organise your budget, creating streamlined strategies to generate the highest amount of revenue for your business.
Proving the ROI isn’t just about justifying your marketing budget spend, but about showing off marketing’s strategic role in driving your business forward. At EM360Tech, we offer guest spots on one of our podcast series, so you don’t need to worry about creating a series from scratch. Get in touch with our team to find out how we can help boost your ROI through a dedicated lead generation campaign.
In a data-driven world, proving your marketing ROI is not optional — it’s essential.