Cape Town, 30 Jun 2017
Marketers are faced with tremendous challenges in 2017. As budget constriction and audience fragmentation continue to drive uncertainty, marketing leaders will need to box clever with their marketing spend to end the year on a successful note. In fact, HubSpot found that 40% of companies struggle to prove any kind of ROI for their marketing activities, making it the second biggest challenge after lead generation.
It is therefore alarming that in a 2017 survey only 21% of marketers could measure their contribution to company revenue. Without proof of the bottom line impact of marketers' activities, how can business owners make informed decisions over the budgets they allocate to their marketing teams? A recent survey found that marketing departments able to prove ROI are 1.6 times more likely to receive higher budgets - but how do marketers prove this value?
According to Forrester Research, marketing professionals will begin to prove their business value when they embrace metrics that are closely tied to costs and revenue. In a recent paper titled 'Collaborate With Finance To Prove Marketing's Business Value', Forrester outlines that for marketers to be on the same page as finance, they need to use data to connect marketing performance with financial metrics, and create marketing KPIs that align with finance KPIs.
Marketers are embracing data and analytics to help them make this link between marketing activity and financial performance. The Harvard Business Review found that 6.7% of marketing technology budgets are spent on analytics, a figure expected to grow to 11.1% over the next three years.
However, analytics are not a panacea for proving ROI: marketers need to integrate all elements of their work in order to show real-time campaign spend and customer acquisition, analytics on customer behaviour, and unlock a constant feedback loop on the effectiveness of activities, campaigns, content, and more.
Marketing automation technology breaks down organisational siloes, integrates all marketing activities and enables marketing teams to instantly pull critical campaign and line-of-business information in real-time through a single platform. Unsurprisingly, companies using marketing automation technology increase their leads while reducing marketing overheads by more than 12%.
Most importantly, among Fortune 500 companies who use marketing automation technology, the average (verifiable) ROI is a whopping 223.7%.
If you're not sure your marketing team can prove their direct contribution to bottom line revenue, is it not time you implemented marketing automation technology to give you the insight and data needed to make informed decisions?
For more about how marketing automation can benefit your business, please send me an InMail or visit www.grapevinegroup.co.za
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