Between clients who (having been inundated by the latest guru’s advice) insist on pushing nonsense on a customer that’s not interested – not the right demographic, not the right target market, not the right messaging – and clients who insist on chasing the wrong metrics – numbers that have no tie to business ROI, sales, or anything other than digital popularity (ie: likes) – most marketers just give up on tracking any sort of meaningful marketing ROI.
What is a legitimate marketing ROI? It comes down to asking 4 questions:
- What is the business metric we want to change? (sales, butts-in-seats, volunteerism, sentiment improvement)
- To what degree do we want to change it?
- What levers will we pull to change it?
- How will we know if we were successful?
Marketing as a whole can be re-examined from top to bottom for startups, and it's not as hard as it seems (and should probably never result in a dusty binder where your looked-at-once-per-year "marketing plan" resides).
