Assessing Marketing ROI: Complex and Necessary  

Proving marketing’s value can feel like navigating a maze blindfolded. It requires unraveling a complex web of data and real-world business impact, and it’s even harder when you’re starting from square one. But here’s the truth: it’s essential. When budgets inevitably tighten understanding the value of your revenue-generating marketing team is essential. 

What we’re talking about here goes beyond tracking the return on investment of a particular project or campaign. B2B healthcare is characterized by long-tail sales cycles. Likewise, tracking marketing ROI requires digging into long-tailed, sustained tracking to assess the whole of marketing’s efforts and outcomes across multiple channels. And while this may seem daunting, the only thing worse than starting is not starting. Because when you begin illustrating your marketing ROI, you’re not just crunching numbers—you’re transforming the perception of your department from a “cost center” to a revenue-generating machine.  

From our experience, this process establishes trust with leadership and shifts the tone of conversations during budgeting season. Rather than having to dread defending the amount of funding your team is asking for, you want leadership to think of marketing as integral to the company attracting and winning business. Instead of responding to a sense of scarcity, you want to proactively create a feeling of possibility and abundance. In other words, rather than the question being, “How much do you want?” you want leadership to be asking, “How many new contracts can we operationally support?  

Rather than having to dread defending the amount of funding your team is asking for, you want leadership to think of marketing as integral to the company attracting and winning business. Instead of responding to a sense of scarcity, you want to proactively create a feeling of possibility and abundance.

By digging into all the different areas that marketing touches and illustrating the downstream impact of those efforts, you reframe the conversation and change the mentality around how valuable it can really be. Read below for tips that will help you achieve just that. 

4 Tips for Transforming Marketing from a Cost Center to a Revenue Center  

Tip #1: Patience Before the Paradigm Shift 

First things, first. We want to reiterate that proving marketing ROI can be a long road. Showing multi-factorial impact takes time. But as you build the muscle, keep these central tenets in mind: 

• Set goals for every initiative in your marketing plan. Encourage your team to adopt a tracking mindset if they’re not implementing one already. This means that with every new project, we ask the question: How will we know we’ve been successful? How will we know we’re improving? Then check in and adjust your strategy as needed.  
• Stay accountable—and consistent. From the outset, do your best to embrace the fact that illustrating the value of marketing will be filled with slow wins and incremental progress.  Like with any good habit, the continual rhythm of tracking will become second nature. Little by little, the efforts will pay off.  
• Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. It can be hard to measure the impact of marketing quantitatively. (Though we do dive deeper into some ideas for doing that below.) But in lieu of hard numbers—or in addition to them—remember that qualitative metrics are better than no metrics at all. Conferences are a great example of this. The number of booth visitors does not reflect the quality of interactions, and the percentage of those interactions that led to downstream sales meetings and contract wins.   
• Accountability is important. Don’t stop at tracking your contributions. Report them out to your team and to leadership regularly. Establish the understanding that you are keeping a close eye on marketing funds and that they are being apportioned thoughtfully and strategically. Be open about which initiatives are working, which ones aren’t, and how you are pivoting future efforts. 
• Have humility. When you present these reports, understand that they may (and will likely) generate questions. Think through what these could be.  Answer honestly, acknowledging what you know so far and what you are still working to understand. Embrace the questions as they come. Think through how you might tackle the inquiries through a different lens or perspective.  
• Remember that marketing is multi-dimensional. Marketing is both an art and a science. Reviewing performance must start somewhere. The specific metrics you track will likely change over time. It’s through this process of trial and error that you’ll discover the data that tells the useful and accurate story about your marketing’s value.   

The specific metrics you track will likely change over time. It’s through this process of trial and error that you’ll discover the data that tells the useful and accurate story about your marketing’s value.   

Tip #2: Reverse Engineer Your Success 

Regular tracking and reporting on each marketing channel will reveal patterns in your data. But from there, you must define the stages of your pipeline to quantify the impact of your marketing efforts at each stage. This is the “elbow grease” component of the data gathering process, that is, the time you just have to dig in.  

To start, you will collaborate closely with your sales team. Together, you can create a comprehensive view of the customer’s journey. You want to understand the steps on the way from initial brand awareness to contract close. Every organization is unique, so define the stages of your pipeline based on what works best for your team. Also, remember to share credit wherever possible—this builds goodwill and more easeful partnership across the board. Rather than working around your sales, there is great value in working hand in hand.

Tracking Marketing’s Contribution to the Sales Pipeline 

We suggest starting a spreadsheet or using a CRM tool to assign your marketing leads to some version of these pipeline stages, from beginning to end. Tracking leads after awareness, opt-in, and marketing qualified leads will require regular conversations with sales. In some cases, you won’t follow one specific prospect from awareness to close, but having a sense of the numbers at each phase illustrates marketing’s value overall.  

Track the number of prospects in each stage of the customer journey outlined below. It’s a good idea to check in on a quarterly basis and compare numbers year-over-year to track growth and value of marketing efforts: 

• Awareness  
  • Prospects who have seen and/or engaged with the brand through top-of-the-funnel marketing efforts (e.g. ad impressions, website traffic, social impressions, etc.). 
  • This is someone who is aware of the company.
• Opt-in  
  • Prospects that have “opt-ed in” to share their information. This could be a booth visitor or someone who filled out an online form. 
  • Marketing will nurture opt-ins on an ongoing basis. 
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) 
  • Prospects who have opt-in/contacted the company that marketing deems “qualified” or relevant to pass to a sales team member. 
  • This is someone who has expressed interest in the company’s product and/or service. 
• Meeting 
  • Prospects who agree to meet with a sales team member. 
• Proposal  
  • Prospects who request a proposal/quote for services.  
• Closed/won or “Lost” 
  • Prospects who have signed a contract—or have walked away after reviewing a proposal. 

When You Don’t Have all the Answers 

There will be some cases where it is not so easy to discern these stages from beginning to end. Perhaps there is no tracking of this kind. Or there is some tracking, but it’s not tied to results. One starting point is to work backwards, reverse engineering from the data that you do have. In this case, you would look at a new customer and discern the steps that got them there. For every contract won, try to understand what led them to find and choose your company. Add a column in your spreadsheet to keep track of the lead source for “closed won” and “closed lost” prospect. Knowing whether your best leads come from speaking engagements, referrals, Google Ads, etc. will give you a starting point for attributing value to marketing efforts.  

Attributing Value to Marketing  

Based on the data you do have; you can illustrate how many prospects marketing brought to each stage of the pipeline. You can take your “Closed Won” contracts whose lead sources were related to marketing efforts and calculate (based on the annual value of the closed-won contract) an actual dollar amount of revenue marketing fueled. (More on that in Tip #3).

Example: Tracking the Value of Conferences  

Conferences are often one of the most expensive marketing efforts and the most difficult to track ROI. While it may seem straightforward to track the number of people who went by the booth, this might not tell the full story. In terms of numbers, let’s say only a handful of people attended. But how did the interactions feel for the people who attended? Were they drawn in by the booth or was one of your leaders speaking at the conference? Did your sales team make a connection with them? Will there be follow-up meetings? Perhaps your sales team is building a relationship with the prospects that they only see at this conference.  

The real value of a conference thus lies in the qualitative interactions – the relationships built; the insights gained. As such, this qualitative information about what did or did not work to engage conference attendees should be examined more deeply. Ultimately, any contribution that marketing makes that helps further sales needs to be looked at and tracked, and used as fuel for optimizing in the future. (Check out our conference planning playbook for tips on getting the most value out of conferences and how to track conference leads). 

Tip #3: Make the Business Case for Leadership 

Now that you have the data, it’s time to tell the story. From increasing client conversions to optimizing investments, your data has the power to drive strategic decision-making at every level. To do that, you need to distill the value of your marketing metrics into tangible business outcomes. 

To begin, you want to illustrate what marketing is doing with the pipeline itself. For example: How is marketing helping bring prospects from the “awareness” stage to a “Closed/Won” status?  How many leads that your team brought in have led to meetings, proposals, and contracts?   

Work with your design team to create compelling visuals that illustrate how marketing contributes to the bottom line. And by the latter, we mean getting a sense of the financial benefits that your marketing team has directly contributed to. Show actual dollars won. To do this, you can equate a dollar amount to the “closed won” status. This will really push this across the finish line to showing value.  

Overall, it’s important to note that marketing and sales is a team effort and most leads’ journeys (especially in B2B healthcare) have multiple sales and marketing touch points. The goal in tracking and sharing marketing’s contribution to that journey is not to take credit for everything. It is to track what you can track and tell the marketing-win stories you find along the way to build trust in marketing and optimize your future marketing efforts. 

One final note on making the business case. You don’t just want to show the immediate value of one marketing initiative, you want to illustrate the accrued value of all marketing efforts. Show a holistic view of how the marketing machine works together across business units to drive growth. This will highlight just how many aspects of business marketing touches, setting the stage for a transition from a department that costs, to one that generates value. This is key to transforming the view of marketing from a cost center into a revenue generator.  

Show a holistic view of how the marketing machine works together across business units to drive growth. This will highlight just how many aspects of business marketing touches, setting the stage for a transition from a department that costs, to one that generates value.

Tip #4: Stay the Course 

As we’ve stated, proving marketing’s value through illustrating ROI is a journey, not a destination. As you begin to report on your marketing ROI, know that there will be times when you will be met with blank stares. Even as you start to see the wins, i.e. the patterns or initiatives that seem worth pursuing or expanding on—there will be times where you might be met by a lack of understanding, even apathy. There may be months where you stand up in front of your fellow leaders and note that you’re not where you want to be. We’ve been there too.  

But even so, starting where you are, tracking what you can, and consistently reporting creates a culture of tracking and attributing value. This helps you be a more effective marketer and it helps you articulate the value of your efforts over time.  

Starting where you are, tracking what you can, and consistently reporting creates a culture of tracking and attributing value. This helps you be a more effective marketer and it helps you articulate the value of your efforts over time.  

Plant the Marketing ROI-Tracking Seed Today and Watch it Grow  

Perhaps you’ve heard the adage. When is the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. Second best time? Today.  

That’s how we think about marketing ROI tracking. While proving marketing’s ROI through data may seem daunting, it’s far from impossible. It does get easier the more you do it. The key is to start where you are with the information you have and stick with it.  

As you regularly assess the value of your efforts and seek to understand what works best, you’ll not only improve your work, but you’ll also build trust across the organization. The sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll have data to make better decisions in the future and the stronger marketing-win stories you’ll be able to tell.