Marketing ROI: Return on Investment or Really Obscure Information?

Marketing ROI: Return On Investment or Really Obscure Information?

Every founder, CEO, CFO and investor wants to know their return on marketing investment. And rightly so. But getting to ROI is not always a straight-forward “dollars in, dollars out” calculation.

Businesses are spending money, investing in a variety of marketing activities, yet unsure of how (or even if) those tactics are moving the needle. 

To reach healthy, sustainable brand and business growth, organizations must move beyond Really Obscure Information to measurable Return On Investment. 

This webinar features a panel of experienced B2B and B2C marketing leaders, who bring some clarity to this very important topic.

Key Takeaways

• Viewing data in silos restricts a holistic understanding of performance, as it prevents organizations from seeing the interconnectedness of different metrics and how they influence overall business goals.
• Promote cross-departmental collaboration to ensure data is shared and utilized holistically across the organization.
• Setting realistic expectations requires analyzing historical data and benchmarks specific to the industry to inform marketing strategies and performance metrics.
• Foster open communication between sales and marketing teams to build trust and reduce competition over attribution.
• Combining data analysis with creative thinking fosters a holistic approach, enabling organizations to adapt quickly to changing market conditions while also exploring new opportunities for growth.

Links & Resources Mentioned

• What is the Authentic Growth™ Marketing Maturity Matrix?
• Glossary: Revenue Team Roles
• Marketing data: From information to intelligence

Webinar Transcription

Introduction

Jennifer Zick: All right, welcome to those of you rolling in. We’ve just opened up the webinar floodgates and I see our numbers ticking up. So I’m going to give everyone a moment to get logged in and settled and then we’ll kick this party off in just about 1 minute. So if you’re just joining now and you were intending to participate in the Authentic Growth™ webinar, you’re in the right place. We’re happy you’re here with us today. I’m just going to give a little bit of time for everyone to get settled, then we’ll be off to the ROI race. 

Welcome, welcome everybody who’s joining us today for the authentic growth webinar. On the topic of ROI, I’m Jennifer Zick, the founder and CEO of Authentic®, and delighted to be the host and moderator for today’s panel conversation with my esteemed colleagues who I will introduce shortly. 

But for those of you who are joining us for the very first time, I first just want to say welcome. We’re so grateful that you’re spending your time with us today. And we recognize that there’s a wide variety of attendees on today’s webinar, from corporate marketing leaders to small business revenue leaders and founders and everybody in between. This is a topic that resonates no matter what size or stage your business is in. So we hope that you’re going to take away a nugget today that’s going to be helpful for your business and your role, whatever that might be. But to help kind of contextualize the audience that we work with the most, I want to introduce you to Authentic so you know who we are and kind of where we come from with the lens on today’s topic. 

So Authentic is a fractional CMO firm headquartered in Minneapolis with beautiful staff all across the country, some of whom you get to meet today, and clients all across the US and sometimes beyond. And the work that we do as fractional chief marketing officers is to help growing businesses to Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently move in the next right direction for healthy growth. So we’re just delighted to work with entrepreneurial businesses. And in our world, that usually means that we’re working with businesses between 5 million and 100 million in annual revenue who have been founder led, sales driven, doing marketing things that might look a little random. 

And then we step in as a strategic leader and advisor and guide of helping them to really be purpose driven and aligned with the business vision in creating strong, high performing marketing teams and programs. So it’s amazing work that we get to do every day with great growing businesses. And I have the best job of all because I get to learn from brilliant marketers all the time as part of our mindshare community. So today is a little bit of a breakout from the kind of conversations our CMOs have every day at Authentic, and we’re delighted to share this time and space with you. So as we get going, today’s topic is on marketing ROI. Now, we all hope that in our worlds, ROI means return on investment and a clear understanding of that. 

But I also know, having worked with a lot of entrepreneurial businesses across many different industries, that often the idea of ROI is really more about really obscure information. The CEO, the CFO, the head of sales, wondering, okay, we’re doing things. We’ve got partners. We might even have staff. We’re spending real dollars. Where are they going? What’s happening? What’s the impact on our business? Top and bottom line and value? So we’re here, hopefully, to help unpack some of that, demystify it a little bit, give you some thought, nuggets and tools and resources to reflect back on. And of course, we’d love to hear your feedback after today’s show. If you’ve got additional questions or want to dig a little deeper, we probably have some content that can help you or some connections on our CMO team. So please reach out. 

So, enough with the housekeeping and the introductions. I’m going to move on to the more fun part of our webinar today by introducing my fractional CMO colleagues from across the country. I’d love to give them each a little moment to introduce themselves and share a little bit about their backgrounds, and then we’ll dive right in. So, Christy, I’m going to go ahead and pick on you first. Thank you so much for being here today. Would you like to say hello? 

Christy Joyce: Absolutely. Hello, everyone. Glad you’re here today. We’re really excited. As Jennifer mentioned, my name’s Christy Joyce. I am a fractional advisor and CMO for Authentic. And that’s such a blessing. Great team, and I have, and if you couldn’t tell by the accent, I am in North Carolina. So I have worked in the B2C, B2B, and then what I kind of affectionately say, B2B2C, industries for many years, and probably notably mostly in the consumer and the manufacturing space. So I really like my tangible products and, you know, I really love metrics. 

As much as I like to think I’m that creative thinker as well, I love the data, and so we’re really excited about how we can help you turn that data, understand what data we need, and turn that into actionable insights so we can beat the competition. 

Jennifer Zick: Thank you. Christy. 

Heather Battison: Hi. Hi, everyone. This is Heather Battison coming to you from Kansas City right here in the heart of the midwest. I come to you with about 25 years or so experience, mostly within direct to consumer space. E-commerce is my sweet spot and I am authentically yours by bridging together the brand components with direct response and really understanding that relationship across the board to really help drive revenue and growth. So mostly my background has been in financial services, but really all things consumer. 

Jennifer Zick: Awesome. Thank you, Heather and Peter, thanks for joining us again, this is not your first webinar with Authentic. It’s great to have you back. 

Peter Zaballos: Thank you. And it’s always super fun. And thank you to everybody in the audience for taking time out of your day to be with us. Today. I am in downtown Seattle and I’ve spent my career in high tech, high growth startups, both as a venture capitalist and then as a CMO. So my background skews pretty heavily towards software and SaaS businesses. And I tell people all the time that it’s never been a better time to be in marketing because there’s never been greater access to data. And marketing is a data driven data foundation business. So I’m really excited to talk to you today. Because this is my favorite topic is how to use data to measure performance. 

Understanding Marketing ROI and Common Mistakes

Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Peter. All right, well, we have a big, wide spectrum of marketing experience on this call. I’m so excited to tap into that. Before we jump into some of the dialogue, I wanna invite the audience to recognize that we have a Q and A option on the webinar. You should see a little icon on your screen. If you have a question related or kind of indirectly related to anything we’re talking about today, I would invite you to drop your question in the Q and A. We’re going to be intentional about leaving some space at the end of the conversation to take some questions from the audience. If you have them, we would love to be able to hit on them today, so please use that Q and A. 

I’ll keep a little side eye on it while we’re moderating the conversation and hope to get to your questions today too. And if we don’t get to your question today, please reach back out to Authentic because we really would love to be a sounding board and resource for you. All right, let’s get the party started. Heather, I’m going to start with you. We’re talking about RoI, metrics, Data. It’s a lot of things. So when we’re talking about measuring marketing for businesses, what are we really talking about? 

Heather Battison: Yeah, there’s no question, at the end of the day, the ultimate metric that we all should be focused on is revenue. I mean, that’s our North Star guiding light, that every single component that we’re focused on needs to bridge back to that ultimate goal. But as we all just talked about quickly during our introductions is data. And these days, we have our hands in a lot of data, and it can be daunting to figure out, well, what does this mean and what does this mean? And I think as a marketer, as a leader, it’s important for us to define what are the metrics that matter. So we have the ultimate revenue goal, right? That’s key. But that layer underneath, what does that mean to us, that layer of data that we should be focused on? 

So, you know, it’s going to be different depending on what business you’re in, what you’re selling, et cetera. And what I mean by that is if you’re a seasoned operator, then you might be driving revenue, but you might be focusing on doing so efficiently. So what that means is you might be looking at the cost to drive those leads, and looking at key components or KPI’s, like your ARPU or your CPA, right. But if you’re still in growth mode and you’re still investing into your operation, then you might be focused more on some brand building techniques within marketing. And so that’s going to have different marketing metrics. Right. That’s going to be a little bit longer tail or have a longer lead time to move the needle to revenue. 

But so you might be focusing on KPIs, like your website traffic, or are you reducing the duration of how long it takes to close a lead or sale? So it really depends on where you are in your business and what it is that you’re selling. So again, as a marketing leader or as a leader in your organization, what are the metrics that matter to you? And so that’s going to be different for you. It also, I just want to stress, it’s important to note that when you figure out the metrics that matter, that bridge back to that revenue goal, it doesn’t mean the folks on your marketing team like, and I’m a talking specifically to, you know, those channel level marketers that they shouldn’t be paying attention to their own KPI’s right. They still are focusing on how to optimize their channels. 

So yeah, your paid marketing specialist for example, they’re going to be focused on the CPC and CPA and all those, you know, data driven components for their campaigns. But as their leader, it’s important to coach them to understand how what they’re managing feeds back into that ultimate North Star revenue goal and if what they’re doing is moving the needle, what’s working and what’s not. So that’s just a little bit. Again, it depends on your business. Ultimate, ultimate goal is to be focused on that revenue, but depending on where you are and what you’re selling, you need to focus on the ones that matter and then go from there. 

Jennifer Zick: Yeah, I love that you’re talking about understanding and contextualizing the lifecycle stage of the business itself and connecting the dots as you build out a marketing function that has multiple roles and different components, understanding how those dots connect. And Christy and Peter, I want to invite you to this part of the conversation too because I’d love to hear from you as we step in and work with entrepreneurial businesses. Founders, obviously founders and investors and stakeholders want to understand ROI. What do they think it means when they’re getting started? How do you help guide them in understanding what it takes to understand and measure marketing? 

Christy Joyce: I’ll jump in if that’s okay. I think, you know, I love what she was talking about, you know, it’s revenue. But for example, as a small business, if brand building is one of the key components and in some cases it’s even a more mature business that you realize you have to build a brand. So from a CEO perspective, that may not immediately equate to that dollar value, but it’s also that marketing maturity that we talk about where we’re building these foundational layers of information to build awareness in the marketplace. So then people do come to us when they’re ready to spend. So I think that’s a huge component there. Whereas if you have a very established brand, then it’s more about just understanding big picture vision goals for the company, what are the numbers that we want to hit? 

What are the big goals that we want to hit? And then making sure that we’re aligned with what metrics we are watching to fulfill that goal. 

Peter Zaballos: Yeah, and building on that, I think we’re all in businesses of growth and revenue is the important ultimate metric because we all get paid in revenue ultimately. But the definition of the metric is going to change as the company grows. So if you’re in a CEO led small organization. The CEO is also probably the salesperson and the product person, and they’re closing deals based on the network they have developed as they’ve gotten this company off the ground. So a lot of what we do is help them think through. As you add ahead of sales, they’re going to expect some sort of demand generation to come with that. So how do you help a CEO led sales organization transition to a VP of sales led sales organization? 

Revenue is still the metric, but now you’ve introduced a whole set of interactions that you need to be monitoring so that when you mature a lead to the point where a salesperson can take it. Your definition of ready is the same as their definition of ready. And you’ve got a set of metrics and automation that lets all of that flow from one set of hands to another. So a lot of what we do is help organizations think about this in the context of where do you want to be in a year and how do you build the capabilities so that you can make that transition really smoothly and confidently? 

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. And I’ll probably refer back to, in fact, let me see if I’ve got it here to grab, literally, I’ll find it in another section. But we’ve recently, in the past year, developed the Authentic marketing maturity matrix, right? And if you’re not familiar with it, attendees, it’s on our site. We are currently producing a number of blogs on the various topics within that maturity matrix. But a lot of what we’re talking about here has to do with the kind of maturity and the stage of the company in its growth, and how people, process systems, technology and data have to move together through maturity in order to give us the kind of insights that allow us to understand ROI. 

So my contribution to this part of the conversation is to say a lot of the CEO’s and founders and CFO’s that I work with, they want to bring in ahead of marketing to quickly tell them their ROI. But the reality is, if the business hasn’t put systems in place with process to begin by tracking engagement and understand the baseline of engagement with the brand, and how people move through the brand experience into conversion and buying and retention and growth, if there’s no baseline of data, without data you can’t have metrics, and without metrics you can’t have insights. And without insights you can’t predict anything. And the process of moving from nothing to baseline to insights like predictive insights is a multi year evolution. 

Key Metrics and Data Collection

Jennifer Zick: So I just am adding that component as we kick this conversation off, because if you’re attending the webinar today and you’re part of an early stage business that might not have marketing automation or CRM or systems and process to capture engagement, then you’ve got work to do foundationally. And that’s often where we’re starting with some of our clients and other clients are further along on that journey. Right. So just acknowledging that and then rolling that context into this next question. 

Christy, I’ll start with you on this. Besides maybe not having that kind of an understanding, what are some of the other common mistakes that organizations make when it comes to marketing data? And also tied to that, maybe their expectations of their agency partners for proving ROI. How do we help make entrepreneurial companies and their agency partners more successful together? 

Christy Joyce: Okay. Yeah, great question. Because we’re talking with another group this week about that same scenario. And I’ll start with the agency partners. And I think partners is an operative word here. And I think a good partner, you have transparency, you have open communication, you’re aligned with the values, you’re aligned with the goals. And I think the more that we can align with our agency partners and find the ones that are, that understand your vision, your goals, and they’re not just trying to give you cookie cutter information, because it’s kind of easy to do. You want to make sure that, again, there’s a weekly dialogue, you know, that there’s KPIs to meet and that they’re fully aligned with what you’re working to do. So then they can tailor the metrics that they’re helping you receive in the right way. 

Because as we all know, there’s lots and lots of ways of measuring that. So I think that’s critical. Just find the right partner and then treat them in that true spirit as a good partner. But going back to the common mistakes with data, how long do we have? Right. I think there’s lots of different categories here. I think there is not enough data. Are we really not paying attention? Maybe we think we know by instinct or past experience. We think we know what the business is doing. So I think a huge mistake is not actually collecting enough data. And as we all know, good data is what’s helping drive and make good business decisions. So it is really important that even if you only have three or four nuggets of information, that it’s the right ones to make good decisions. 

And I think the next is maybe you’re collecting too much data. You know, we are, as Peter was saying a few minutes ago, we’re in this massively data driven world. And everywhere you turn, they’re collecting it on us, we’re collecting it on others. And so there’s a lot, and I think it’s easy to get carried away with data for the sake of data. But the big question is, you know, what are you doing with that? And in some cases, I think maybe less is more. You know, it needs to be right, more is not just always better. And I, you know, one of the things just slightly, what we were talking about a few minutes ago is always staying focused on your company vision and goals. 

And then if you are collecting data, just being very judicious about which ones are going to help you achieve these goals, you know which ones are giving you that information. I think another big mistake that we could talk about is looking at data in silos, because I think what that does is it paints a very segmented story to your business, where I think, and sometimes it’s what the data is not telling me. But you don’t know that until you kind of aggregate it from different channels or different areas. And when you then put kind of mesh it all together and you really see some interesting insights bubbling to the surface. And, you know, I think even with that creative thinking, you go, okay, what is this telling me here? But what can I learn from that? 

You know, this is kind of my hard data, but what can I extract from that, too? Make our marketing efforts and strategies even more effective? You know, of course, this never happens in any of our businesses, but the pet projects, you know, the vanity projects, you know, our CEO, not ours literally, but, you know, a CEO says, I love this, and my brainstorming idea, you know, we want to measure this, but the reality is that may not always be what’s best for your business. So I think we lovingly present the facts, the metrics back and help them understand that maybe this is great, but it’s not going to help us achieve the company goals. And you mentioned a good CRM. 

I think one of the mistakes is not investing in the right technology, the right software support, even in some cases the right employees to help us generate the good analytics and reporting. So again, we could go on and on, but that’s a few of the things that I’ve seen over many years and lots of different clients. 

Jennifer Zick: Heather, it looked like you had something to add. 

Heather Battison: Yeah, I just want to expand on everything that Christy just said because it’s spot on and there’s probably many more that we could keep going with. I want to give a real life example of the pitfalls of the silo portion of what Christy was just talking about. Years ago, I was honing in on data and analyzing the performance of the direct to consumer marketing channel performance. So what I saw was that we just were not being very efficient with display, but paid search was just killing it. It was really inexpensive, both brand and non brand. Oh, why are we spending so much money on display? Let’s optimize, move dollars over to what was working. What I didn’t see at the time was the relationship among the two channels. And what was happening was the display was the introducer to the brand. 

So people were impressed upon. And then seven days or so later, sometimes later, they were coming back through paid search and converting. So what happens is I slashed the budget that was fueling the funnel. So all of a sudden, start dwindling and dwindling. So you just have to make sure that you are looking at the full scope of the performance and all the different metrics and what the relationship is among those channels to get to the ultimate goal. And then secondly, about partners and agencies, et cetera. Yeah, you might have just an agency that’s helping support you on just paid search, for example. But as I just, what I just noted to you is paying attention to all the different data components within the other channels in that relationship, it’s important to be able to share that information with that partner as well. 

They can’t do their job if they’re only focused on data metrics in a silo as well. And so it’s, you have to get past the. It’s not so much of a territory grab or protecting boundaries with your agency partners, because sometimes there’s more than one, but it’s sharing the data so they can understand and interpret it to make sense to help you do your job, too. 

Jennifer Zick: So, so true. Boy, we all. We’re needing to move to the next question, but, Peter, is there anything you want to add on this? Because we have so many stories from the crypt on the. 

Peter Zaballos: No, I think I can build on this a little bit later. 

Jennifer Zick: Okay, well, I’m going to add a very quick story that ties back to what Christy mentioned about two things. Not having enough data to understand and understand the why and what’s happening, and also the need for a CRM underpinning this. So, in our own business, Authentic, which is six years old, I’ve been the tip of the spear in business development most of these years. And for the first three years of my business, I assumed that our deal cycle was about six months. Sure, it takes about six months of working with an executive and their leadership team to make the decision. Well, after three years of building data, I finally went back. 

And this is a key piece, knowing what question you’re trying to ask of your data, because if you don’t start with a question, a hypothesis to test, you’re just looking at numbers, right? But if you know the question, you can find answer with enough historical baseline. So I asked the question of my data. I took a subset of all the deals we had won in three years, and I looked at their deal cycle and I was profoundly blown away. I learned that when we win a deal, all the deals we win from start to close are 30 days or less. And so with that insight, I was able to look back at my pipeline and realize we were just sandbagging a whole bunch of things that were never going to move. 

Building Marketing Infrastructure and Managing Expectations

Jennifer Zick: And so were able to instill more muscle and rigor in our sales process and clear out the deals that are non movers, move them back into a nurture stream, consider them a new deal if they come back up a year later, but get the things out of the way that are sapping our energy and create space for more deals to come through, right. And so that those kinds of insights you can’t get to if you don’t have some history to go back to and to look at and bring a good question to. So, Peter, this next question is, I’m going to pitch it over to you. When we’re asking smart questions of our data, what are some of the most important revenue or growth metrics that businesses ought to pay attention to? 

And I know you’re going to answer this from a strong B2B background, and then we’ll ask our counterparts for some B2C perspective, too. 

Peter Zaballos: Well, to me, the most important metric, and it’s not one metric, but it’s a metric that applies to almost everything you do in marketing, and that’s conversion rate performance. So at whatever juncture you’re looking at engagement from the first touch to the first login, there are a series of intentional junctures that you guide a prospect through. And we’re all super fluent in the HubSpot buyer’s journey model, which works great where you’ve got awareness, engagement, conversion. So looking at, and you’ll build your content journey up very intentionally and Google will rank you on your ability to sincerely help people develop awareness, help them make considered engagement, and then help them convert. So looking at the conversion rates at each of those junctures and looking at the conversion rate from a form fill to what a BDR takes, and from that to a completed sale. 

To me, conversion rates are really the foundation of what we do. And building on what was said a bit earlier, you’re not going to know any of this. One of the traps I feel like organizations and CEO’s get into is they expect precision before you can have it. Going back to when I was in venture capital, we were funding series A companies. So generally speaking, they didn’t even have a product in the market yet. And we would sweat through three year revenue plans. At one point I was talking to a CEO and he’s like, why are you just grilling me on this revenue plan? And I said, the only thing we know about a three year revenue plan before you ship the product is once you ship the product, all these numbers are wrong. 

But this revenue plan has all the assumptions about your business. And we want to understand the assumptions so that when you start collecting data, we’re going to know which assumptions are still valid and which ones need to be recalculated. It’s the same thing with marketing. You’re going to have some assumptions about how many touches at the top of the funnel it takes to create a converted sale. And it’s just an assumption. So you need to build an organization that looks at data as the fuel to encounter failure with and optimize it so you can improve success. 

So to me, getting very fluent in understanding conversion rates, creating a culture where your team looks at a failed experiment as data to help you get a better experiment, is probably the single greatest characteristic you could build into a marketing organization where using data to help inform, how do you successfully improve performance over time? 

Jennifer Zick: I love that explanation of the process of hypothesis, experimentation, insight, refinement, stronger hypothesis until you have facts, until you have something to ground the business in. And that’s really true. And for any agencies that are listening in today, or even marketers, and we’ve all felt the fatigue of the 90 day trial period that CEO and CFO think marketing ought to be able to drive 90 days with this agency. And if we’re not seeing new leads, and if we’re not seeing ROI, we’re out, right? A lot of the education we do at Authentic is helping them understand the journey, all of the experimentation and refinement that it takes to create strong, healthy, revenue generating, sustainable teams and programs. Ladies, is there anything you want to add on this particular point? 

Heather Battison: Yeah, I mean, again, it’s finding the metrics that matter for your particular business. Of course. I think the conversion rate is obviously, like we were talking about earlier, their north star’s revenue. Yeah. Conversion rate is right there with one of the key components, I think, for direct consumers. I myself, for a lot of my clients will focus on the CPA, but that is also for a little bit more season when you’re trying to get efficient. And I want to pre answer, I guess one of the questions I saw in the Q and a too, is when you figure out your CPA or your CAC or you’re looking at that evaluation model, I prefer to use working media dollars for to end of that calculation versus all in marketing costs. And the reason why is if you’re making that data actionable, right. 

You need to think about what the media dollars are working towards. So, you know, is it the pr costs or agency fees or did you spend marketing dollars for photography, for example? Is that going to help you make a decision or optimize the campaigns? Probably not. So working media is, for me, the straight media costs that you are analyzing to really get to that efficiency, Mark. So CPA, that’s what that equals for me. 

Jennifer Zick: So, Heather, for those on the call that are non-marketers and might think CPAs or tax people are accountable, can you tell us what CAC and CPA stand for and why that’s native language for marketing leaders? 

Heather Battison: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s, it’s cost per acquisition. How much is it costing you? What are you spending to get that one conversion or that? Not lead, but that one conversion. So that’s what CPA means to a marketer. CAC normally is all in, it’s all of the marketing costs going into that. That conversion metric. So that would be everything that touches under the marketing umbrella. 

Jennifer Zick: Got it. Thank you. 

Christy Joyce: And Jennifer, I can add a couple of things there. This is a little more granular, but I love what Peter was saying, and maybe it is a southern thing, but we call it testing, modifying test again until you hit the sweet spot. So I think, you know, to your point, the experimentation and the failure, there is no failure. You learn from it and you adjust. So I think that’s a huge thing. And I think from a CEO perspective, going in with eyes wide open, that it will be a series of testing and in some cases, again, a little more granular, as are you doing what we call AB splits? Are you testing the same kind of promo, but in two different ways to see which is going to work the best and in what region. 

Christy Joyce: And so there’s so many things, again, when we’re talking B2C, D2C. It can be even small things like keywords. If you’ve got 50 that you want to hit on and 20 are already ranking really high, why invest more money there if they’re already doing well? Let’s invest in the others that we want to grow. But we wouldn’t know where to put that money if we haven’t tested these things. And part of that, too, is that holistic approach, making sure that, again, understanding the vision, understanding your target audience and that segmentation, and then how all of these channels are speaking to them until you hit that sweet spot. 

Balancing Data and Creativity in Marketing

Jennifer Zick: This is so rich and so good. And we’re going to need to make up a little bit of time here in the tail end of this webinar. And I’m going to kind of combine these next two questions because we have a question from the audience that ties into this. Okay, so, Peter, I had intended to ask you about some helpful tools that businesses ought to be like. Baseline, Martech, stack. What does that look like to start collecting the data that helps you understand performance and optimize? And then, Christy, I had wanted to ask you about what if you don’t have a way in place to track Roi? One of the questions coming from the audience right now is, how do you go about collecting the right data if your sales team isn’t using CRM? 

Like, if there’s not a CRM, what is a marketer to do? And first of all, let me just send a little love to that marketer out there if you’re a marketer, because that’s real pain. That’s a real challenge. Okay, so, Peter, let me start with you on the tech stack, and we’ll segue just naturally into this. What’s somebody to do if they don’t have much existing knowledge yet? 

Peter Zaballos: Yeah. So I think it breaks into three categories of consideration. One is you’ve got to have a collection of tools that help guide your search performance. So you should be looking at who are the Personas I want to engage with? What are the problems they have, using their own words to describe them? Because at the top of the funnel, they have a problem. They don’t know you exist, and they don’t use any of the words that you use to describe a solution. They’re up at 03:00 in the morning typing something into Google about their problem. So having your Personas clear and then having a set of tools that will help you map out the search landscape for the terms those Personas are going to be caring about. So tools like Semrush or Moz or aHrefs let you use them. 

Eventually you’ll have a specialist, a search engineer doing this full time, but just letting you understand what are the terms that your prospects care about and how does my content perform against those terms and perform against my competitors. And that is going to involve creating a whole bunch of activity on your website and in your social channels. So the next set of tools you need to think about are how are you going to measure the activity on your website? Google Analytics is pretty much the go tool there, but that requires a fair amount of sophistication to go set up. So this generally will be one of the areas where you’re going to start moving into wanting a specialist to say, okay, you own the website and eventually this person would be called marketing operations. 

But having a way to instrument your website so that you can be measuring engagement, you can be measuring bounce rate. So when somebody comes to a page and leaves really quickly because it’s not what they were looking for, and when somebody stays on a page and moves to another one, eventually when you have a sales force, you’ll be able to send them things saying, hey, this prospect was on our site three times today, but something to measure your website engagement and then going back to conversion rate. The best performing conversion page is the one that asks the least amount of information from the prospect, which gives the marketing organization the worst starting position to start thinking about how to re-engage with these people. 

So there’s a set of tools that will augment that data you collect on that very sparsely populated form that you have them fill out and enhance that. So tools like Clearbit or Apollo from Zoom info or kickfire let you take that. And especially in the age of mobile phones being the only phones, some of these tools specialize in enhancing mobile phone numbers so that you have a clearer sense of who this person is. This also bleeds into how you work with the sales organization? Because we have all, I think, learned the hard way that when the sales rep calls a prospect and says, hey, I noticed you were on our website three times yesterday. 

That prospect tends to get creeped out and leave having a really great relationship with a sales organization so that they understand how to productively engage with this enhanced information. But if you have those three sets of tools, you’re going to be able to present to the sales organization a pretty well informed sense of who this person is, what they are interested in, and what their problems are. And then how can you productively have the sales organization. Take that to the finish line. 

Jennifer Zick: Great. So one thing you didn’t mention, but I think it’s implied there, Peter, is that behind your website there’s a CRM where if somebody converts through a form fill, even if you’re just capturing just the email, we’re not freaking out because we can augment the data and get a sense for who that is. But that information goes somewhere so it can be managed, it can be handed off to sales. Right? 

Peter Zaballos: Yeah. And actually that’s a really good point. This also implies that you’ve got a great close relationship with your counterpart in sales because you need to understand when they get that lead, what definition do they apply to that lead to progress it from 0% chance of closing to 100%. There’s probably going to be three or four stages. And what touches can you pass along to that sales organization to say you’ve got this deal at 60%, you should know that they were on the site twice yesterday. They downloaded this white paper and it looks like they might have this problem. Here’s some material that you can pass along to them in your next conversation. But this has to be a team sport and a continuum of activity between marketing all the way through to a happy customer. 

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. And Christy, for those who are kind of just getting started on this journey and maybe they’re feeling a little overwhelmed listening to us today about, wow, this is a journey. I have a lot to build. This takes a lot of things. Let’s help them go back to their leadership teams if they’re not the leader, and manage some expectations. How long does it take for an organization to start to put these things in place, start to measure and be able to understand ROI. 

Christy Joyce: So I think for deeper insights, obviously it could take six to nine months to really get some good traction and possibly even longer. And obviously year over year, you’re going to want to collect that data. But there are also some things that within a few weeks, as crazy as that can be, you can actually start dipping your toe in the metrics, whether you’re b two b and you’re primarily posting on LinkedIn as a business, LinkedIn has free insights. So I mean, there are some tiny ways that you can start watching engagement. And obviously as that builds and more engagement, you’re going to get more followers. So then a couple of weeks later you’re going to start tracking it that way. And that seems so simplistic. 

But if you’re starting from scratch, I mean, there really are some easy things you can look at. You know, Facebook, Instagram, you know, if you’re doing advertising there, you can easily watch demographics, time of day, you know, those insights, and again, low dollar spend and you’re starting to learn. So if you’re talking about starting from ground zero, I think there certainly are some things that you can start doing and I think that gets us all excited. I think there’s some baseline CRMs, you know, that you can get started with that will start giving you some information. There’s heat mapping, so if you’re not familiar with that, it’s where you can actually watch the trajectory of a visitor throughout your site and just learn metrics there as well. 

So even though it sounds sort of simplistic, I do think there are some basic things that depend on the type of business that you can do to start learning. And the more you learn, the more you want to learn. So I certainly think that builds, but for those that don’t have anything and you know, it’s so non techie. But I mean, just having internal reporting, I mean, if you’ve got to start somewhere, is somebody tracking something on an excel spreadsheet that you can sort just to start giving you some kind of historical data to start making good decisions and, but I think part of that is getting in and understanding your business, understanding those big picture goals, and then starting to figure out how you can start small and then keep building and gain that maturity over time. 

Jennifer Zick: I think that’s such wise advice. And some of what you talked about is if you don’t have the whole infrastructure built in house yet and you have to take the time to do that, you can lean on some of the data and analytics of those external platforms that are part of your mix. The other encouragement I would give to the very early starters on this marketing journey, when I was still, when I was first starting Authentic and coaching some of our clients, they had been successful, founder led, sales driven businesses who had done nothing yet for marketing other than a basic website, nothing. And they really struggled with how do we know where to invest and how to get to ROI? What should we do? 

And the guidance I gave them is in these early stages of building a baseline and building this platform, it’s okay to set goals and metrics around activity before you get to the data. So for example, when I was just starting Authentic, I knew that I would have to build content to fuel the marketing program, to create the engagement, to create the data. So my metrics were, have I produced two blogs a month? Did I go back and ask every client to use their logo? I had this checklist of things that were activity driven that I could report on performance in order to start creating activity, that started to create engagement and that engagement started to create data. So there’s always somewhere to start with accountability and data and reporting as you build toward ROI. 

Collaboration and Attribution in Marketing

Jennifer Zick: And Heather, coming to you with this next question. A big part of building that marketing engine and having the space to experiment and learn and optimize is getting the buy-in from leaders to the investment of the resources and the time that it takes. So you’re a seasoned CMO, you’ve worked with a lot of leadership teams. How do you manage expectations with your leaders to help them know this is the journey and here’s what you can expect. 

Heather Battison: Yeah. So what’s difficult is it all depends. It all depends on what type of business you’re in and what you’re selling, what your, what industry it is, you know? So there’s not a clear, concise answer for everyone. However, you know, if you’re selling garden tools in retail versus engagement rings online, for example, there’s a different decision making process. It could be five minutes, it could be an impulse buy, or it could be five months, depending on what that typical buyer cycle is. So that’s what you have to consider as it relates to communication or in being a partner to the leadership team is really gauging those expectations based on that. And just be clear. What I like to recommend is, look, we know that to be effective and sustainable, it’s going to take time, right? 

We could have some great whales or some seasonality can kick in, but we want sustainable growth and that’s going to take time. But when we outline our plans, we should include checkpoints or milestones and keep the leadership team in touch with that. So we share what’s working, what’s not, the tells that we’re seeing within the data and making sure that we are being very transparent there. So those milestone goals, again, depending on if it’s a five minute purchasing decision or five months, they’re going to be different. But to have those checkpoint goals, you know, rarely in the consumer world, rarely does a customer have that happy path of seeing one ad and converting. 

And us as marketers, it’s up to us to understand, you know, what is the message, how many touches that art and science of marketing and then layering on the timing of it to get to the right mix, it takes time. So I guess in the end it really, we need to give it time so we understand what is working and how we get there to make it effective and sustainable. 

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Peter and Christy, anything to add on that piece? 

Christy Joyce: Actually, I have an example to that because I love what Heather said about each customer and each sale is different. I’m currently working with a client that doesn’t sell direct to consumers. They sell to distributors and dealers who then sell to consumers. And part of that was simple things like how much traffic are we driving to our own website? So in turn, the consumer is finding the right dealer in their location. So in order to have better relationships with our dealers, we track the data for the number of potential prospects that we’re driving to them. So it’s little things like that actually help you become your brand, become a better partner within a scenario like that. 

But then we also have, you know, a different client that is specialized in one state and they want to make sure that we’re driving traffic, you know, from different channels direct to there. So again, every scenario is different and it’s just a matter of what’s the data and how are you going to utilize that to help you grow a business. 

Jennifer Zick: Well, we could speak at length with a lot more stories for each one of these topics that we touched on. I am thinking of a real life story, either from our own journey at us, authentic brand, and what we’re learning as a growth company and what our clients are learning in their work with us. But I want to leave time to address some of our audience questions because these are some smart questions. I’m going to turn my attention over to the Q and A, where there’s a couple of questions I want to pitch back to you. One of them is CPA versus Roas. Okay. So I’m going to let the marketers in the room unpack that one. But this particular audience member is saying they prefer Roas because it’s measuring revenue versus just conversion on an individual order. Right. 

Which can be a low value, high quantity. So looks looking instead at quality and overall value. Thoughts on that? 

Christy Joyce: I can jump in.

Heather Battison: Oh, good. 

Peter Zaballos: Yeah, no, go ahead. 

Heather Battison: So I have one point. A lot of the companies that we work with, right, they are not as advanced to be able to report out on ROAS. ROAS is absolutely what I would prefer. It just, it depends on what accurate data that you have that you can tie back. So then usually it’s CPA that you can just think through if you’re optimized. And you have to think of the objective of what it is that you’re looking for. What are you going to do with that information if it’s yet you’re at the campaign level and you’re just looking at a specific marketing channel, then CPA is going to help you more. Right. Because you’re just trying to optimize everything, taking a step back and looking at the overall how the business is doing. 

And if you, again, have the accurate data, the ROAS is definitely the way to go. Peter? 

Peter Zaballos: And I would say it’s a trick question because you just run the risk of getting the illusion of precision before you have it. And ROAS works great. A couple of jobs ago, I had 125 people working for me, and were a public company doing $250 million of revenue. So I had an FP and a group that helped me a lot with ROAS. But if you’re a small company and you’re just getting off the ground, indexing over there may give you the sense that you’ve got precision in your measurements when there’s so much unknown that CPA is just a quicker way to get the pulse of what’s actually happening right now, to Heather’s point in that campaign. 

Jennifer Zick: Awesome. All right, so this question came earlier in our discussion, so we’re circling back to some of where we started today, but the question is, this person says they have the biggest challenge in separating the what from the why. How do you not get carried away seeking the why in data, or should you? I don’t know. Thoughts, Heather? Yeah, it’s difficult. 

Heather Battison: Again, it depends on your business. And I think, as marketers, we want to know as much as we can about the target market. So we want to get in their heads and understand, you know, their passions and the whys. Because if we can understand the whys, then we can optimize our messaging, we can figure out how to target them, et cetera. So, . But sometimes we just can’t. No, we won’t know. And so it’s, it’s not safe to assume. So, you know, you just have to be very cautious on how much it slows you down. 

Christy Joyce: And I’ll add to that one, too. You know, I even mentioned it earlier on. I like, in some cases, what the data is not telling me, if that makes sense. And, and once you’ve meshed it all together and you’ve learned from it, and I do think there’s, there should be a degree of what is. What am I taking away from this? What’s my brainstorming around this? And a little supposition as to the whys of this happening. So I don’t think we get too caught up in that. But I also think that gives you a really interesting testing ground, too. You go, okay. My assumption here is that it’s x. So maybe we test that from what we didn’t see here. So again, I don’t know that I would rely solely on the wise. 

I like the hard data, but I think there is that small degree of kind of appreciating the creative side of what can I learn from this? Or if it’s not telling me something, what does that mean? And how can I apply that back and learn from it? 

Jennifer Zick: That’s so good. All right, we’ve got an audience question. You have one last chance to throw a question in the Q and A. We might be able to hit on it before our time is up, but I’m going to answer the one that I still see here, which is, what are your perspectives on multi touch attribution modeling to get at that right mix from top to bottom of the funnel or that flywheel? 

Peter Zaballos: This ties into something that Heather and Christy talked about before and a thing earlier about having this partnership with sales. To me, attribution can be a really problematic topic to dwell on because it’s really about trying to get credit. And a lot of times when attribution becomes a focus of the conversation between sales and marketing, it’s really saying, sales and marketing don’t trust each other. That all starts at the top, because Heather brought this up earlier. She had a display advertising campaign that was running, she realized was actually creating the demand for her paid search campaigns. I had an experience where a couple of jobs ago, we were doing demand generation, trying to get to retailers. We had the head of e-commerce at a big retailer fill out a form and we could show the path came from a marketing first touch. 

And it created a huge rift with sales because a salesperson had been calling on an account for two years. And what she thought were saying was we wanted credit for that. And what were saying was two years of work caused somebody to pull up and go, wow, I think these guys might be able to help me. So I look attribution as a litmus test of do you have a trusting relationship with sales? And does the head of sales have that with the head of marketing? And then how do you look attribution as a team sport where you don’t assign ownership to it, but you count it because those are engagement points that matter. And then you can collectively say, how much attribution engagement produces a sale. Let’s try and orchestrate that together. And we talked earlier about that’s understanding. 

Once the salespeople get it, are you feeding them things that help them and how are you measuring the effectiveness of that? 

Jennifer Zick: I can’t like that hard enough on this webinar because I grew up in sales before I was in marketing and I love and appreciate all the roles involved in nurturing an unaware individual or buyer team into awareness and down the pipeline. And, and I’ve seen so many toxic company cultures fighting over who gets credit for what, when. In fact, if we have a singular vision as a business and a goal to achieve, all ships rise as a consequence of collaboration. And in fact marketing too often also I think gets pigeonholed as the team creating demand. And that’s it. But in reality, marketing is the thread that binds all facets of the business and the brand experience because brand is the promise your organization makes to the world and how everybody experiences whether you’re delivering that promise or not. Right. 

And that threads through acquisition and onboarding and retention and growth and partnerships and employees. Everybody benefits from marketing wrapping their arms around all of those touches, right? So that is, thank you, Peter, for unpacking that. And I could not agree more. Any responses to that? HeatHer Christy. 

Christy Joyce: I think it is about working hand in hand. I mean I do think sales and marketing have to work hand in hand and part of that data could be that here’s our marketing strategy for this effort. But oh, by the way, at every third step here, sales is making a touch point as well. So I think even with that you can understand that process. So it’s not a he or she, but rather this is the total process and how it worked together. So I completely agree with what Peter was saying. 

Heather Battison: Yeah, I do too. And I mean, and then direct to consumer language when there isn’t necessarily a sales team, everything, you know, especially even with e-commerce, it’s just again, understanding the relationship among the channels and not discounting what some of the, and don’t call brand fluffy. But what are the, what some of the, you know, entryway points are and how that relates into, yeah, you know, your PR or maybe even your content strategy might not be the end all converter but you know, make sure you’re paying attention to the metrics to understand how it’s influencing sales and understanding the relationship. And it isn’t all about giving credit. 

Jennifer Zick: Right. 

Heather Battison: It’s, it’s especially if you have like a last click model and you’re not giving a certain percentage of the so called credit to different channels. Right. If you’re just looking at the last click. Just make sure you are paying attention to the full funnel that they engage the customer, engage with you before they make that decision. 

Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Well, I know I learned some things today, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by so much wisdom and diversity of experience with all of you. Thank you so much, Heather and Christy and Peter, for being our panelists today. Thank you so much, audience, for joining us. I hope that you’re taking away at least one helpful thought. Nugget or tool or resource. And we’ll be following up with a recap in your inbox with this recorded session. If there’s someone in your world you’d like to share that with, and because I’ll be in your inbox, I invite you to share your feedback with me. If there are topics you’d like us to address that would be helpful to you, we are all ears. 

We want to help your business continue to grow, to overcome random acts of marketing, and confidently take that next right step in healthy growth. So thanks again so much, panelists. I just love spending time with all of you, sending you back into your days to go help our clients overcome their random acts of marketing. So thank you. And until I see you again, take care, everybody. 

Want to dig more into marketing ROI? Check out our guide Marketing ROI: A Guide to The Big 3 Revenue Metrics, where we dive into what happens when businesses don’t track the right metrics, the importance of understanding your existing customers, and the three revenue metrics your business should be tracking.