Companies often struggle with measuring the impact of their marketing strategy and tactics. While the sales organization has orders and revenue as directly-measurable outcomes, marketing works in context of indirect metrics such as impressions, visitors, leads, and attendees. A Marketing Strategy Impact Model enables you to determine the most productive marketing channels and the overall investment needed to drive company revenue goals. You can then maximize marketing ROI by prioritizing those marketing tactics that most efficiently enable sales results.
Marketing strategy includes:
attracting prospect interest (outbound marketing),
maturing prospect consideration for your offerings (lead nurturing), and
delivering sales enablement resources that demonstrate capability (providing customer credibility).
Marketing Funnel
Marketing Strategy Approach
The outcome that can be targeted and measured across outbound marketing and lead nurturing is a “lead”. This is usually defined as obtaining opt-in personal information that can be used for sales & marketing follow-up (e.g., a web visitor volunteering their information to access a particular download).
The first step is to model your outbound marketing and lead nurturing tactics (e.g., online ads, social media posts, events, etc.) as well as the corresponding leads typically generated. In addition, assess the effort (labor) and cost associated with each marketing activity. This enables weighing relative productivity across different marketing tactics.
Next, define your revenue model including allocation of sales targets across distinct products that marketing needs to support. You can then derive the corresponding leads that would need to be generated (considering your typical lead to sales close rate) as well as the corresponding effort and cost. You will need to iterate to zero in on an accurate model, but it is a relatively straightforward spreadsheet exercise.
Results
The Marketing Strategy Impact Model approach yields relative costs of lead generation (by marketing tactic) as well as a sense of the scale and marketing mix required to yield the desired revenue outcome. Sharpen up your spreadsheet skills and gather your marketing data to generate your own Marketing Strategy Impact Model. The end result enables marketing leaders to take a more proactive, data-driven approach to representing their strategy and impact on the company. Note: this type of quantitative analysis is also core to Competegy’s Partner Mapping tool (for partner ecosystem capacity planning).
Discussion Topics
Have you modeled how your marketing activities directly impact company revenue?
Do you feel confident about the relative ROI of your marketing tactics?
Are sales teams aware of the marketing’s lead qualification efforts and engaging highly qualified leads appropriately?
Would outside perspective add clarity to your marketing optimization efforts?