Have you ever been asked to demonstrate the value of your marketing budget to leaders within your business? You’re not alone According to LinkedIn’s B2B Benchmark report, 76% of B2B marketers feel under pressure to prove return-on-investment in the short term while nearly half cite ROI as the most important metric when reporting to the CEO, CFO and other board members.
However, when it comes to collecting insights to help do this, 72% of marketers are struggling to understand and explain the data they have at their fingertips. This is resulting in marketing budgets being placed under increased scrutiny, with business leaders perceiving it as a cost creator rather than a revenue generator.
We know that this perception needs to change but the question is how? In short, we know that data is key but the real magic happens when that data is used as part of your measurement toolkit to show the impact of a marketing campaign.
Impact – your marketing budget shield
Demonstrating the impact of your marketing campaigns is crucial if you want to safeguard your budget. Understanding impact is therefore an effective tool to have when challenged, when compiling reports, or when monitoring the success (or failure) of a campaign. If you can demonstrate the impact of your activity within the context of the business, you are much more likely to see your budget grow rather than reduce.
Data – a powerful tool to get a true picture of impact
In today’s marketing environment, nearly all activity has data that sits behind it. The trick is to successfully interpret it. Once you’ve done this, you can gain useful insights that well help to drive future decisions.
To elevate this further, it is even more important to be able to provide a narrative around what the data is telling you, so you can quickly explain to others why and how your marketing has delivered value. This is what impact really is. It’s the story the data is telling you about the success or failure of your campaigns.
Effective measurement lies in the interpretation of the data story
Data is essentially just a summary of a thousand stories. Stories are incredibly powerful so by telling just a few of them, you can make the data meaningful, bringing it to life and demonstrating the value through context. In a nutshell, the real value in effective impact measurement is in the interpretation of the data.
To provide the context to the data you will need to understand what the activity was trying to achieve and then look at how the data supports this. Data needs to be drawn for a variety of different sources in order to make the story compelling – this could be a combination of website traffic, content downloads, social media activity and editorial coverage, to name just a few. To track the real impact of your activity will require multiple data points over time.
Failure is feedback – don’t try to hide it!
Some marketers are fearful of data as it can expose failures. But failure can be viewed with a different lens– it is your audience telling you that your campaign wasn’t quite right. Data is the key for effective feedback – short of talking to every prospect and listening to their story, it’s the best way to gather actionable insights. Failure is simply feedback in another format.
Having one eye on the data allows you to make changes to your marketing activity in real time, taking on board the feedback and tweaking your campaigns until they start to have a positive result. Without the data you are running blind.
Predicting the future
Data insights can do more than just give you a historical view. By understanding the story the data is telling you, you can more accurately predict the responses your marketing will receive. You will also be better equipped to know what message works with which audience, what type of content delivers the best results, when the best time of day is to target your prospects and also which type of activity drives intent.
Don’t take a shot in the dark. You have data – use it!
Planning your marketing activity without data is like taking a shot in the dark – you are just guessing at what will have the biggest impact. In an age where AI is growing exponentially, it’s only a matter of time before a system is developed that makes this an automated job but for now, the AI exists within your own brain. Taking the numbers to create a meaningful narrative – the real impact and value of what you are doing – allows you to celebrate the successes and understand the failures of your campaigns. This is crucial to demonstrating the value of marketing to your business and ultimately to protecting your budgets.
Download our Demystifying Measurement report for more information.
