ROI in Marketing summary

Here’s a scenario: A marketing team at a major bank gets a new director – let’s call her Marina. The bank’s performance has been declining steadily over the past few years, but Marina is determined to turn things around.

One of the issues that gets her attention is the bank’s high number of customer complaints. She looks into this and discovers that many customers feel that the company takes too long to address their concerns. So, after some brainstorming, Marina decides to fix the problem by introducing a new system for managing complaints and queries.

Think about all the businesses you interact with. Perhaps you buy their products, use their services, or even work for them. Each one may be wildly different from the next, but one thing is for sure: they all have business goals and, consequently, business needs. 

Every department, team, and project within a business is aimed at obtaining its needs, and marketing is no exception. With this in mind, you’d assume that all marketing campaigns and projects have business needs at their core. But, surprisingly, this isn’t the case. A study by the ROI Institute found that the number one reason marketing projects fail is a lack of alignment with the business.

In the previous blink, we learned that part of a successful marketing campaign is setting objectives at every level, from reaction to impact and ROI. Once this is done, the question becomes how to design the campaign and implement it so that all the objectives will be met. And design thinking has a couple of useful principles for achieving this.

The key message here is: To meet marketing objectives, empathize with the audience and experiment with methods.

Imagine you’re part of a marketing team in a large tech company. Despite being a market leader, the company has been struggling in recent years. Customer satisfaction keeps dropping, and profit margins are shrinking.

The team learns that customers are unhappy because sales agents don’t understand the products, and so can’t make good recommendations. To address this, they design an internal campaign to educate the sales force. They work overtime on it, conducting training sessions and distributing resources. After the campaign ends, sales increase by 30 percent – a great outcome for the team!

Putting a marketing campaign together is no small feat. From identifying a business need to finding a solution that fits perfectly and implementing it, it takes a lot of time and resources. So a positive return on investment from such a campaign is definitely a reason to celebrate.

However, getting a return on investment is not the end of the story. If marketers want support and that all-important funding from their higher-ups, they need to share their results.