Return on Marketing Investment : ROMI

Measuring Return On Marketing Investments ( ROMI ) in the B2B domain, has been a buzz word for a long time. It is a bit different on the B2B side of things than B2C. Here in B2B, we deal with a committee of buyers, team of people who are comprising of decision makers, influencers, evaluators, who are looking for ROI from the products/services that businesses have to offer.

Digital marketers are relatively doing a good job of measuring ROI as it is relatively easier to access data from digital platforms. But the big question is how are we measuring ROI or are we doing it the right way?

As B2B marketers, we are moving from traditional marketing metrics like lead generation, to influence revenue, to accelerated revenue to what we now call is marketing engagement. At an account level, marketers are now using AI to understand how engaged that account was, and how engaged the account is in now. Lots of inputs that can go in to determine the engagement level of an account, and that has a direct bearing on the business metrics, in terms of having that account as a customer. This is a token of digital transformation of the marketing world.

Many a time, the prospects are fence sitters. For eg, when one plans to buy an enterprise level CRM solution, there will be a lot of debate happening at the buyers' end apart from the feature discussions. Decision makes would be worried about its impact on the internal sales operations, while the IT folks might be perturbed about the security and the integration issues of the tool. The end user like the marketing operations person will be concerned on the responsiveness of the vendor in terms of offering service support. Lot of deliberation happens during the buying process, and at times showing the buyers an integrated solution actually accelerates the purchase.

Earlier there was a clear distinction between marketing and sales in terms of revenue support. Marketing used to get the leads and salespeople would take up the leads, chase and convert them. With digital, things have changed a lot. Now marketing guys are doing more of selling and sales folks are doing a lot of marketing. Long gone are the days when a phone call was the only option to reach a support team. Customers now prefer to use a company’s website for support. When a customer wants to evaluate a new product or service, their first thought is no longer to pick-up the phone and talk. Instead of speaking with a sales representative, they now want to find the answers online via an FAQ article, how-to video or a knowledge base. All these collaterals are created and maintained by the marketing team. While the sales people have now become more of a solution consultant who connects with the customers to provide them with precise solutions for their business problems. Sales often seeds the idea of a new product, which has the potential to alleviate the painpoints in the mind of the customer, thereby generating demand for the product in the target segment.

This calls for a shared understanding of the buyer's journey and what it takes to drive customer preference. The challenge is how do we get it in time, specially in B2B, which has longer sales cycle and there is a huge dependency on other teams to deliver within strict deadlines, as we work have to work with multiple people from different departments like creative team, PR, sales, pre-sales, customer success, product management, delivery etc.

At the end of the day, we all are doing account-based marketing as a part of the same team. Marketing, sales, subject matter expert, everyone needs to come together as a team in order to engage an account. All of us should be enabled to drive the buyer preference, to ensure conversion. This requires lot of stakeholder interaction.

My thoughts on what can marketers do to measure better are;

• Decide on KPIs to optimize marketing campaigns . KPI is mostly related to efficiency with focus on short term success of the marketing activities
• Work on ROMI basis the overall objective of the business. ROMI is related to effectiveness of marketing objectives. Whether it is the topline growth or retention of the market share, ROMI is long term and strategic in nature
• Getting the stakeholders involved well in advance, to co create the ROI. We need to educate them about the difference between KPI and ROI in marketing
• Metric is not a strategy. Business rhythms are very fast and furious. With daily reviews, monthly forecast, quarterly results, we marketers are expected to show contribution to the business in all the reviews by showing definitive ROMI. This is irrespective of the fact that, whether the ROMI we show is giving us the true picture of the customer centric business objective. We need to understand that fresh sales/up selling/ cross selling opportunities depends on the customers business cycles, not on our quarterly review meetings and targets
• Collaboration and stakeholder management is critical. Customer is measuring us as one entity. We need to sell solutions which evolves with customer’s needs. Solutions need to be agile, nimble, reliable, so there is lot of change up in the air. Lifetime Customer management is critical. It is important to have a joint dashboard as a single source of truth, focusing on viewing the problem from the customer’s perspective. Make customer’s problem feel like yours and focus on lifetime customer value as a joint ROI
• Trust is often left unsaid, and trust is an outcome. It is the mission we all strive for. It is a true north, and that can never be a number

What ideas do you have for measuring marketing ROIs?