What's Stopping you from Measuring your Marketing Return On Investment?

You know that marketing can make you money but so far you have struggled to provide any meaningful MROI. Social media analytics are all well and good but when it comes to asking your Finance Director for additional budget for your next campaign, it doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

You’ve done the necessary research, and are committed to starting to measure your MROI - but now comes the difficult task of understanding what’s stopping you and how to overcome the blockers. Like most things that are worth doing, it might not be easy but by breaking it down it is certainly achievable. 

BLOCKER 1 - AGREEING METRICS WITH THE SLT 

The metrics should be agreed between senior management who understand what good looks like for their business. Of course, sales and revenue is the most crucial metric for most businesses, as this highlights whether your marketing efforts are making or losing money. However, the aim isn’t always to generate money; unless goals and objectives are defined, there’s no measure of success. 

Marketing can then define the ‘how’ and put the processes in place for effective measurement.

BLOCKER 2 - GETTING BUY-IN FROM THE TEAM

You shouldn’t have to try too hard to get buy-in from your colleagues. They will want to prove their impact as much as you do. 

Marketing works best when sales and marketing objectives are aligned so make it a priority to find an ally here, again agree what good looks like and organise regular meetings to share information and update each other on the progress of campaigns. 

The hardest nut to crack will be the SLT - especially the finance director. 

“I haven’t met an FD yet that fully embraces marketing spend on marketing R&D projects with agreed ROI metrics in place. It can see the battle often lost before the marketing warfare starts.” Jo Perrotta 

But having sat down with them in step one, this should be easier to do. 

BLOCKER 3 - SETTING A BUDGET

Again, you may need to go head-to-head with the finance director on this, which is why step two is so important as it will make having conversations with the FD about budget so much easier. 

Establishing a marketing budget is highly nuanced but 5-10% of company revenue is a common rule of thumb for an established business. 

According to Hubspot: "The amount of revenue businesses allocate to marketing has grown over the past 12 years, with the average at 8.7% of overall company revenue in 2022. That’s over 5% growth since 2011. B2B product industries allocate, on average, roughly 7.8% of revenue to marketing. This is similar to B2C services (6.5%) and B2B services (5.9%). B2C Product allocates the highest amount at 15.1% of total revenue." 

Obviously, if you have aggressive plans to grow in a short period of time, you’ll need to increase this figure. For example, technology companies typically dedicate around 20% of revenue to ensure they attract the eyeballs of investors and potential buyers. 

With a clear MROI, it can be easier to justify budget requests for other marketing campaigns, investments and innovations. Company directors are also more inclined to reduce marketing budgets if they fail to see a clear MROI. 

BLOCKER 4 - THE TECH 

CRM 

Let’s talk about CRM access - if you don’t already have access, request it now. To those of you that do, it may seem crazy that some marketers don’t have access to the company CRM but it is a reality we hear about all the time. 

So that’s step one, step two is to work out how to use it to gain insights. 

"A CRM will give you both a high-level and on-the-ground picture of sales performance, including team-wide and individual conversion rates by deal stage, average deal size, deal velocity — and that’s just scratching the surface."  Hubspot

Imagine how powerful this data-backed data could be in providing an understanding of what’s working and what could be improved.

Step three is getting recruiters to record the sources of their placements. You can see how each step gets incrementally harder! 

You MUST capture candidate sources if you want to accurately measure MROI! Jo Perrotta 

Make sure your tech stacks-up 

We know what recruitment business owners can be like with tech, they are attracted to the next shiny new thing that promises to solve all their problems. But what inevitably happens is they end up in a situation where they try to adapt their processes to fit the tech platforms rather than the other way round. So we think this is a good place to say that setting the right processes and strategy should always come first, and the technology should be implemented to effectively support these, not the other way around. 

What is a tech stack?

A tech stack is the combination of technologies a company uses, which typically consist of programming languages, frameworks, a database, front-end tools, back-end tools, and applications connected via APIs. It is important to integrate all tech with the CRM where possible to make reporting easier. 

What else you need to know

GA4

If you're still using the Universal Analytics properties this will stop processing data on 1st July 2023. You will need to upgrade to GA4 to ensure all your data is still being processed. 

Google Search Console 

Search Console will help you monitor your website traffic, optimise your ranking, and make informed decisions about the appearance of your site's search results. You can use the information in Search Console to influence technical decisions for the website and do sophisticated marketing analysis in conjunction with other Google tools like Analytics, Google Trends, and Google Ads.

In conclusion, yes there are blockers but as you can see once they have been identified they can be broken down into manageable steps. The end goal is to change the perception of marketing within your organisation and this becomes a hell of a lot easier when you have the stats to back it up. 

Need more clarity? Download our latest guide Yes Marketing Can Make You Money, Time to Start Measuring It.