Blog
Marketing ROI; Challenges & Opportunities
- Blog
- Marketing ROI; Challenges & Opportunities
- By Heather Stewart
Share
Is Your Marketing Department Set Up To Fail?
Three fundamental challenges marketing departments must overcome to deliver ROI.
You have a plan, a strategy, and tactics in place. Your marketing department is functioning offline and online with blogs, social media presence, and a full website working its magic. Maybe you have an e-commerce site. Your ads are running and generating clicks and business is bumping. But how well are all those systems really working for you and your team?
A key part of you and your marketing team’s success is your ability to measure the results from each channel or campaign you are putting your efforts (not to mention budget) into. You also need to communicate the results to your executive team whose aim is to spend less on advertising while squeezing more sales out of every marketing dollar.
Accurately measuring the ROI on your marketing efforts has been lauded as the great success of the new age of digital marketing, but it has become the nemesis of any marketing team trying to show its worth and value.
In working with marketing managers, marketing directors, and marketing teams as a whole, we recognize the overarching challenges marketing departments are facing. To allow for successful marketing, there are 3 fundamental challenges you must first overcome.
1. Your Team Is At Maximum Capacity
Whether it is just you, a small team, or a large team, it is likely that with the ever-evolving marketing trends and the need to be ahead of the game you are all tapped. Each person is working at their fullest capacity and struggling to adapt to changes in areas like tracking conversions and identifying specifically which marketing channels are quantifiably performing the best.
With so many marketing specializations your team is likely wearing many hats. Whether you are the digital designer, the content creator, the social media specialist, etc. your role encompasses far more than what your title holds.
Without the capacity to keep up with the data, the in-house dashboards, and close monitoring, can you tell how good your efforts are? It is easy for you and your team to continue pulling the surface numbers to submit each month, but what if we could help you do more? Without having the time and capacity to tap into the real numbers and dive into changing up some of the systems you are using, how do you know you’re showing your team and the business its fullest potential?
We know you have the ideas, you know the business inside and out, but the people power to keep the information up to date is not always obtainable.
See How We Can Support Your In-house Marketing Department
Got a gap in your team’s expertise? We’re here to support your marketing team to:
- Fill in gaps of expertise to ensure you’re firing on all cylinders
- Make sure you are measuring the metrics that communicate ROI to your executive team
Find out what we can do for you.
2. Effectively Track the Metrics That Matter
As marketers, it is easy to fall into the trap of, well we are busy, therefore all of our strategies must be working. When the reality is that just because you are busy, doesn’t mean that there is no room to improve.
Maybe that print ad has gone stale and is not generating the traffic that you think it is, or maybe your Facebook Ads have a substantially higher cost per lead (CPL) more than your Google Ads.
Using conversion tracking and attribution it is easy to see how effective your digital ads are, but seeing all your numbers together in one report will allow you to allocate dollars to the avenues that are performing best. When you are constantly fine-tuning your ad budgets, you will start maximizing leads and more importantly, sales. Don’t we all want to make more while spending less?
But what do you do when your ad sources are not digital?
A simple call tracking number through a company like CallRail and a personalized URL will allow you to effectively track leads that come in through these avenues. You can then tag these leads in your CRM (Client Relationship Management software) and produce an accurate cost per lead (CPL) from print advertising.
Understanding your online and offline marketing efforts in a full picture will allow you to not only properly distribute your marketing budget but also allow you to obtain tangible numbers of revenue for your executives.
3. Bridge the gap between executives and the marketing team.
Business executives often have the perception that “Sales generates revenue and marketing is an expense”.
The executives have hired you, and maybe a marketing team to market their business and/or product. The reality is, they likely are unable to keep up to date with the ever evolving world of digital marketing and all that is required to generate leads. They see the sales numbers and what is being “spent” on marketing and expect a simple correlation between spending more money on marketing and a higher return in sales. If only life was that straight-forward…
It becomes your job to correlate your marketing efforts with their top line revenue numbers and convince them that marketing is not an expense, but an investment.
So how do you make their investment into your team valuable to them in dollars brought in?
You are the expert in your field, you have the goals and the systems in place, you’re running campaigns but what do the numbers generated mean for business? The traffic to the website, the extra sales online, and the influx of walk-ins – how are you making that correlate to your marketing efforts? Was it the billboard on the side of the highway? Maybe it was the Facebook ad you are running? Are your marketing efforts converting into direct sales and how do you show that.
Having the data simplified and organized in a way that connects real numbers to sales will be crucial for bridging the gap between you and your executives.
Having the data simplified and organized in a way that connects real numbers to sales will be crucial for bridging the gap between you and your executives. Your top-tier employers want clear yes and no answers. They want to see dollars out returned and multiplied into dollars in.
There is no one size fits all marketing approach, and maybe there is no real definition as to what marketing exactly is, however, what we do know is that it is a crucial part of the business.
It isn’t just waving a magic wand or throwing a bunch of ideas in the pot and hoping something sticks. It is about meeting the needs of the ever-changing customer. Showing the ROI can be tricky and will pose its hurdles along the way but with valuable ROI, it makes every effort worth it.
If you still need help navigating either of these areas, reach out to us. We have social media professionals who are experts in B2B strategies. We’d love to help you reach your goals.
Book a consultation with Sayvee and together let’s see how we can help you improve the success of your marketing department.
Post Author
Heather Stewart
Heather has a substantial background working in Federal and Provincial politics. She has created content for a variety of elected officials from coast to coast. Her communications background in both the public and private sector has provided her with ample experience in writing, strategic social media planning and marketing initiatives.
