Giving Marketers the Tools to Finally Conquer the Great “Marketing ROI” Challenge

 

Commentary:

“Marketing ROI” — scary words for marketing professionals, as getting a clear picture on how marketing campaigns directly relate to larger company KPIs is one of the most persistent challenges in the industry. Marketers are vocal about it, too. Marketing intelligence companies surveying marketers find that 80% of marketers self-report facing internal ROI pressures, yet 60% lack confidence in their marketing data, and 47% believe they don’t have the skills or ability to calculate ROI on their campaigns at all.

Why do marketers feel it’s so hard to measure and prove their ROI on marketing investments? Is it an internal miscommunication? Is it a lack of resources? Are campaigns themselves lacking the proper definitions for useful ROIs? Peter Mahoney, Founder and CEO of Plannuh, a marketing operations company, gave us his perspective on the challenges marketers claim to have around measuring ROI, and breaks down some ways to rethink marketing campaigns to make their impacts easier to analyze.

Abridged Thoughts:

So people often ask me why marketers think it’s so hard to measure and prove their return on investment for their marketing investments. It turns out that it seems simple, but it’s much more complex than you might think. First of all, what’s the big deal? It’s return divided by investment. That seems like a very simple equation. So let’s break it down a little bit and look at the individual elements to see what it takes to actually calculate ROI. First of all, on the return side, if you ask your CFO, the CFO would say that return is actually the marginal return of profit based on the investments that I made. And that’s not the language that marketing people think of most of the time. Best case, they think about revenue. Sometimes they think about pipelines, sometimes they think about leads. So you really need to translate that. So what happens if your campaign is focused on early stages of the sales funnel? You need to think about how that will translate to, ultimately, pipeline, to revenue, and then to marginal profit sometime in the future. And that can be difficult for people to do.

More Like This Story:

How to Track ROI with your Content Media Channels

Should AV Marketers Treat Content Creators as Prosumers or Professionals?

Follow us on social media for the latest updates in B2B!

Image

Latest

Education R&D
Will the New Education R&D Bill Spark the Innovation Schools Desperately Need?
April 25, 2025

In a rare show of bipartisan cooperation, Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO) and John Cornyn (R-TX) have introduced the New Essential Education Discoveries (NEED) Act, aimed at revolutionizing how the U.S. invests in education innovation. The bill proposes a new National Center for Advanced Development in Education—akin to DARPA but for schools—within the Institute for…

Read More
How Verizon Business Utilizes UGC for Sales Enablement
How Verizon Business Utilizes UGC for Sales Enablement
April 24, 2025

In this episode of UGC for B2B, host David Dabney welcomes Cesar Teran, Verizon’s Sales Enablement Lead for Channel, to explore how user-generated content (UGC) is transforming training and team engagement at Verizon Business. Cesar shares the journey of introducing UGC into Verizon’s training initiatives, emphasizing the importance of authenticity, collaboration, and celebrating contributions….

Read More
digital freight invoicing
ODeX Is Leading the Charge in Digital Freight Invoicing
April 24, 2025

Global shipping continues to grapple with fragmented billing processes, often delaying cargo movement. According to McKinsey, adopting an electronic bill of lading could save $6.5 billion in direct costs and enable $40 billion in global trade. As vessels carry goods for thousands of shippers per voyage, the administrative burden of managing and reconciling invoices…

Read More
Human Intelligence Movement
Just Thinking… about Reimagining Education for the AI Era with the Human Intelligence Movement
April 24, 2025

As artificial intelligence reshapes education, work, and daily life, educators are grappling with how to prepare students for a future where human skills—not just knowledge—will be paramount. In fact, a growing number of reports highlight that employers increasingly value collaboration, communication, and emotional intelligence over memorized content. Amid this transformation, the Human Intelligence Movement…

Read More