Return on marketing investment (ROMI) can be measured in multiple ways, which often depends on what 'return' an organisation is looking to achieve. Most of the time, the desired return is a financial one, such as pipeline generated or new deals won. However, some organisations may choose to measure things such as brand awareness, or focus on an earlier stage return, such as Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) generation.
Measuring ROMI
Whilst ROMI can be measured in a number of ways, it's most commonly associated with pounds and pence return on marketing activity - and from our point of view, it should be (as you’d imagine from a company called ROMI). Gone are the days when marketing was considered the “make it pretty department”. Business leaders are now demanding their investments in marketing pay back.
For many marketing teams providing the return on investment isn’t the problem, it’s proving it. According to this survey of marketing professionals, the majority (84%) felt under pressure to prove ROMI to justify budget increases for campaigns and general marketing spend. The problem is that many are struggling to find an effective way to measure ROMI, with the survey revealing that as many as 61% of marketers choose to make strategy decisions without considering ROMI. Why? They don’t have confidence in their own data.
The question is, why does ROMI reporting sometimes feel like an impossible dream?
Clearing the first hurdle: data integration
First and foremost, reporting on ROMI is technically difficult. In a modern marketing function, with multiple martech tools, different teams, and 3rd party agencies, ensuring your data is clean and integrated can prove extremely challenging.
This is especially true when considering pipeline data (which is essential to ROMI reporting). While tools such as HubSpot enable sales and marketing to work side-by-side and share a single platform, it’s common for pipeline data to reside in a separate system and is often managed by a separate team.
This makes getting all your sales and marketing data sufficiency integrated a massive first hurdle for those aspiring to report on ROMI. It may be straightforward enough to see how many form submissions you’ve generated on a landing page, for example, but without integrating your pipeline data how can you be sure how much revenue has been generated as a result?
Finding connections
ROMI reporting is very difficult as in most cases it is impossible to attribute a sale to any single activity. This is particularly evident in B2B sales processes, which are both lengthy and complex. A customer may have sat on three webinars, read five blogs, and visited the site three times - so which one, if any at all, led to the sale? Whilst in this instance attribution modelling can help, what about all the activity that you cannot see - such as conversations with sales colleagues or 3rd party reviews? Put simply, you cannot be sure what your report says has led to the sale, is actually what led to the sale.
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Following the clues
Does this mean we're saying these sometimes tenuous connections mean there's no point in reporting on ROMI? Absolutely not, you most definitely should be reporting on ROMI. But reports should be considered with that understanding in mind and will require a little bit of gut feel thrown in. What your ROMI report is telling you should be considered a “clue” rather than an instruction.
Notice you're generating more revenue from webinars than any other content? Run more webinars and test the correlation. Perhaps you notice your blogs haven’t generated a single penny. Does this mean you should pull the plug and stop producing blogs altogether? Well, that depends. If your gut is telling you they're having an unseen impact that you simply can’t measure ROMI on, which in all likelihood they are, then removing them could have unintended consequences. And that’s ignoring any impact they might have which isn’t ROMI driven, such as brand-awareness and thought leadership.
What were saying is that while ROMI reporting is absolutely a key activity, it really shouldn't be used as an opportunity to hyper-analyse absolutely every little bit of marketing activity you do to find sure-fire answers. You won't be able to put your finger on a specific activity that ultimately led to a sale. But that doesn't mean those activities aren't worthwhile, as they all most likely played a part in the process.
Keep chasing the impossible dream
So what do we recommend? There is no off-the-shelf tool that will give you the exact answers you need. You’ll only find frustration if you’re chasing after absolute figures of how much a webinar cost to host vs how many leads it generated. The fact is that a lot of these ready-made platforms don’t have the flexibility or ability to take multiple inputs and manipulate them in the way required to give a clear figure.
The answer is a bespoke solution that will require time and money invested into it. It won't happen overnight, and you may never get the instruction manual you’re searching for, which is why we argue that ROMI reporting is in fact an impossible dream. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put the time and money into it to get as close as possible and generate the valuable clues that’ll help direct your next strategy.
Ready to explore a customised ROMI reporting solution? Contact us to learn more about ROMI IQ, our completely bespoke reporting platform that enables you to report the return on your marketing investment, how you want to.
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