Two Ways to Improve Your ROI Credibility

With the fourth quarter of 2019 well underway, many marketing leaders will have already started planning for 2020. In most cases, the planning process will include an analysis of how well marketing performed in 2019. and many marketing leaders will use return on investment (ROI) as the primary tool for conducting this assessment.

Over the past two-plus decades, ROI has become the “gold standard” for measuring marketing performance and for communicating the performance and value of marketing to senior company leaders. So you would think that, by now, marketing leaders would thoroughly understand what marketing ROI is, and how to calculate it correctly. Unfortunately, however, that is not always the case, as a recent survey conducted by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions makes clear.

The LinkedIn Research

The Long and Short of ROI report is based on a survey of 4,000 B2B and B2C marketing professionals from 19 countries. Survey respondents worked in a wide range of industry sectors, including technology, financial services, professional services, and manufacturing. The survey was conducted in June 2019.

Most of the results presented in the survey report refer to “digital marketers.” Unfortunately, the report does not define who “digital marketers” are, nor does it indicate whether all of the survey respondents were “digital marketers.” With that caveat in mind, here are the “headline” findings from the LinkedIn study:

• 70% of digital marketers claim they are currently measuring ROI.
• 77% of digital marketers measure ROI during the first month of a campaign, even though 55% of those marketers reported having a sales cycle that is at least three months long.
• When most digital marketers say they are measuring ROI, they are actually measuring a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs), but not true ROI.
• 63% of digital marketers don’t have a high level of confidence in the “ROI” metrics they are currently using.