Growth & ROI with Marketing Transformation

UK businesses are changing and there’s been a lot of heavy investment in digital transformation, and it appears that there’s a lot more to come. We’ve seen two big demands from businesses on their marketing teams, which are feeding into this desire for change. Both demands intertwine but they are:

1. The business needs to see value from our marketing team - what’s the ROI and why should we give more investment?
   

2. The business needs to grow by x in the next 3-5 years by doing y, how is the marketing team going to support us?
   

If we take the first request, businesses are now asking more from their marketing teams. We’re quickly moving past the days of marketing being a tick box function. Board members are starting to demand that the teams move to an evidence-based approach - proving return, impact and a case for future investment. 

This is an incredibly exciting position to be in. It’s the golden opportunity to prove that marketing is worth the investment, and if you can work out how to show a true ROI - that for every £1 you spend you deliver x - you’ll easily be able to build future investment cases.

A lot of businesses struggle with this because they don’t have the fundamentals in place to measure accurately. Either their technology isn’t up to scratch, there’s no strategy for campaign management or hierarchies, or everything is disjointed. To be able to confidently prove a clear ROI and marketing influence you need to ensure your operations are strong - that’s the technology, data, processes, and people within the team.

So where do you start? Our first recommendation is to look at all of the data and analytics you have - what do they tell you and what’s missing? If nothing’s missing then you’re in a great position but, if there are missing data points such as conversion, leads, or AOV, then you need to start here. How do you get this information, where is it held, and what state is it in? 

If you’ve never calculated ROI before you’ll probably find that it’s negative, or generally low. But that could be for a number of reasons. Firstly, how are you calculating ROI, is it with every single marketing cost including salaries? What about brand and PR which aren’t revenue driving? What about technology that’s mandated by the business but cross charged? Figuring out how to define it, getting it agreed and then working out how you increase income and reduce expenditure is a key step. When our CEO did this exercise at Equifax she was able to reduce costs by £100,000 in one year simply by renegotiating a technology contract - that saving was then pushed into another area proven to drive a higher ROI.

One word of caution we will add here is not to try and overcomplicate this. Whilst it might be interesting, you don’t need to know the ROI of a single brochure or report you sent out, or even of your marketing automation platform. What the board and your execs should be interested in is the overall number - how are you contributing to revenue, and if they gave you an extra £10k next year, what that will turn into. Make sure you’re taking a step back and a more holistic approach.

The second request is about a new direction or business ambition and how marketing will support the business. This could be anything from “we need to invest in AI” or “we should be penetrating a different market” or even “how do we get stickier customers in the next 2 years”. All of these questions require businesses to look underneath and see how their marketing teams are built and supported and it requires moving away from the norm. 

Businesses that speak to Attributed Marketing usually request one specific thing which means they’re clear on what their ambitions are but they just don’t know how they’re going to get there. It could be a specific revenue target or a percentage of the market they want to engage in, but whatever it is, it’s different from what they’ve done before. This means their team don’t necessarily have the skills or (most likely) the experience to prioritise or understand how they get from where they are now to this clear objective.

This is when marketing leaders usually decide to bring in third party support. 

Whether done in-house or externally the first thing you need to do when faced with a new business direction is to understand exactly where you are now. Audit everything you’re doing and be honest about the reasons and results. In order to change you’re going to need to change, so start by identifying opportunities. Most marketing leaders will know straight away some of the big problems (“we don’t have a CRM”, “we’re a siloed team”, “my team is great at tactical work but not strategy”) so the question is, what’s the best way to tackle this - and can you do that whilst still delivering in the day to day?  

A lot goes into these two requests and they’re not simple to answer. If you’re already struggling with delivering against existing targets, or just don’t know where to start then consider outsourcing the project. Even having a team like Attributed Marketing spend 3 months identifying all of the problems you need to fix can take you a massive step forward. 

Get in touch if you want to discuss this further.