Chief Marketer Asks….What Matters Most in ROI?
Chief Marketer recently asked several marketers—including speakers at this summer’s B2B LeadsCon in New York (Aug. 24-26-join us!) and some of the 2015 Marketing Edge Rising Star honorees—for their thoughts on the best ways to gauge ROI, both personal and professional.
Mark Rentschler, director of marketing, Makino
Key marketing ROI metric for your brand?
Total revenue and market share
Biggest ROI challenge?
It’s hard to gage specific performance for opportunity generation from individual tactics using a well-integrated program.
Vital marketing investment this year?
Developing a customer portal.
A recent personal investment & the ROI?
My second oldest daughter’s wedding! Everyone sure seemed like they had a great time at the reception.
Warren Sukernek, director of marketing, Triumvirate Environmental
Key marketing ROI metric for your brand?
Real revenue and profit that can be attributed to marketing rather than vanity metrics.
Biggest ROI challenge?
Based on the customer journey and multiple touches that occur, attribution is always a challenge.
Vital marketing investment this year?
Marketing automation to improve and move prospects throughout the funnel.
Most recent significant personal purchase & how you judge the ROI?
College tuition for my son. As he’s a freshman, it will take a few years to gauge the ROI of that purchase stream.
Clint Hughes, VP marketing, MediGain
Key marketing ROI metric for your brand?
Top line revenue. ROI = revenue minus cost, divided by cost. Cost can include personnel salaries and bonuses, or just the cost of a channel.
Biggest ROI challenge?
The human factor. Different sales people have different levels of expertise and ability. It can be a great lead but the might not be chemistry between the rep and the prospect.
Vital investment this year?
Increasing the digital marketing budget, in particular advertorials.
Most recent significant personal purchase & how you judge the ROI?
An 80 inch 4k/3D TV and all new stainless steel appliances in the kitchen. If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!”
Rachel Allgood, SVP, marketing/consumer insights, Gamut, a Cox Media Co.
Key marketing ROI metric for your brand?
My team oversees monitoring, optimization, analytics and making sure we’re meeting KPIs. If customers are meeting their KPIs, we’ll actually make more money.
Biggest ROI challenge?
We’re very focused on measurability. Every trade show and campaign we do, we need to go back and prove ROI.
Vital marketing investment this year?
Our programmatic platform, and creating private marketplaces.
Most recent significant personal purchase & how you judge the ROI?
A Roomba! It’s incredible. It gets under the sofa, the beds and it gets all of the dog hair.
Louis Cohen, SVP/head of external digital marketing, Citi Cards Digital Acquisitions
Key marketing ROI metric for your brand?
Because my team is trying to scale profitable acquisition of accounts, our most important KPI to gauge ROI is LTV (lifetime value).
Biggest ROI challenge?
Determining proper attribution for the breadth of media & variety of touch points a consumer has with our brand.
Vital marketing investment this year?
Trying to solve attribution modeling and developing infrastructure to support more refined targeting solutions. The goal is to provide a better experience to our consumers, and these investments will help us improve the acquisitions experience by offering the right touch points more efficiently with the right products and services.
Most recent significant personal purchase & how you judge the ROI?
We recently renovated our house to give our 3 daughters their own bedrooms. My daughters are ages 5, 3, & 1, and if I look at this on a purely cost basis, spreading that expense over 20 or 30 years, it adds value to my home. But the real ROI is simple—making my daughters happier. That’s simply priceless.
Lisa Radding, director of research and product development, Ethnic Technologies
Key marketing ROI metric for your brand?
Each of our customers has their own metrics specific to their use cases.
Biggest ROI challenge?
Knowing what to measure. Big numbers don’t necessarily translate into big ROI. Our customers struggle to balance “larger” against “more precise.”
Vital marketing investment this year?
Internal product infrastructure. We diversified responsibilities in a way that allowed us to more efficiently support our customers. Sometimes the best investment is the one your customers never see.
Most recent significant personal purchase & how you judge the ROI?
I bought a corn tamale topped with braised duck. My boyfriend claimed not to like duck, but he loved this tamale. This purchase contained a quantifiable number of calories and sustained us for a measurable number of hours. But this duck topped tamale demonstrated to him the awesomeness of duck. It introduced him to a new protein. This purchase was an investment in dining for the rest of our lives.
Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, CEO, Hawthorne Direct
Key marketing ROI metric for your brand?
Cost-per-lead, cost-per-acquisition, web hits, web response, lead generation results, point of sale data, direct sales, brand engagement, total rating points/branding, upselling additional product and media costs
Biggest ROI challenge?
The sheer number of touch points and potential metrics that exist right now in both the online and offline marketing environments. Few would argue the fact that there is so much data to look at, and that knowing exactly which metrics warrant measurement, review, and action can be completely overwhelming.
Vital marketing investment this year?
We constantly encourage our team members to be in think tanks and challenge ourselves to dig deep and innovate. We love to see what develops and thrive on it.
Most recent significant personal purchase & how you judge the ROI?
A new home. We recently sold our 3-unit apartment building (which we were used to sharing with multiple tenants) and purchased this new single-family home so that my young son could have some extra space to run around and grow up in. Once we moved in, however, I realized that our new abode would also make a great place for filming TV shows and commercials, so we started to rent it out to production companies.
