Saas Marketer - Is ROI Effective Enough?

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Is ROI an Effective Way to Measure B2B Marketing Success?

📚 The Heavy Burden of a Marketer

Marketers, especially in B2B, have it tough. There’s a lot of pressure to connect with audiences in a way that generates a return on investment (ROI). The truth is that no one knows, really, how their marketing campaign is going to go; we can use data and analytics and metrics to make an estimation of sorts, but nothing can ever really tell us how something is going to go.

Marketers are not clairvoyants. And yet for some reason, CEOs and clients seem to have it in their heads that we are.

That, dear reader, is the burden of a marketer. The expectations for results are often astronomical, bordering on unrealistic. And how is a marketer’s effectiveness measured? Is it through engagement? Response? Reputation? No, no, the answer usually tends to be this: ROI

🤔 Is ROI a Good Way to Measure Effectiveness?

To answer this question, you need to acknowledge that it depends on the context. If your goal is to increase your clientele or sell more through marketing campaigns, then yes, you need to be able to track if you’ve made an ROI through it.

But what if your goal is to increase brand awareness? Or increase online engagement? Is ROI still a good enough measure of effectiveness?

In the Currency of Effectiveness series, Mark Ritson, Columnist at Marketing Week, was joined by Cheryl Calverley, former CEO of Eve Sleep; Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo of the LinkedIn B2B Institute; and Matt Holt, Chief Strategy Officer at Digitas.

Quite rightly, Weinberg touched on the fact that there never seems to be a confirmed right or wrong way to approach and measure marketing. He said, “I think there’s a problem in marketing where the answer is always ‘it depends’. There’s no right or wrong way to do anything. And I don’t know how helpful that’s been to the practice of marketing, because it means anyone with a microphone can opine upon the best way to do [it].”

So what is the best way to measure marketing’s effectiveness? There is still no universal set of rules, and maybe the best we’re going to get right now is ‘it depends’. But we can all agree that ROI is an irritating form of measuring effectiveness, and it can make marketers feel small that their work is being reduced to numbers.

We need to think up new ways to measure success, not just through data and analytics.

We need something more human.

Read on the web >>

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Keep growing,
SaaS Marketer

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