Do Marketing Campaigns Deliver ROI?

We see quite a bit at Proof Analytics, and the learnings come fast and thick. Here's one.

#B2B marketing teams often think in terms of campaigns, and there is a strong desire to attribute certain impacts or value to this campaign or that one.

But the reality is that a campaign is really an administrative or thematic bucket of marketing investments deployed between this date and that date.

That date range is important because that triggers a time-to-value calculation, but that's where any practical idea of "campaign attribution" ends.

Even more importantly, the investments in a campaign each have a different time to value (time lag). This means your investments will pay off (or not) at very different times in the future, even if they were all launched on the same day. (The graph below is a generic portrait of how trajectories and associated times to impact/value can vary a great deal.)

The analytics show very clearly that B2B marketing's value creation is usually very asynchronous vis-a-vis sales productivity. This asynchronous quality is why it's the campaign elements -- not the campaigns themselves -- that are the attributable value creators, and why they each have to be computed separately before a stack-ranked portrait of attribution can ever be considered real.

Mark Stouse is CEO of Proof Analytics, a powerful new ROI analytics platform that bridges the gap that between business leaders and their marketing and communications teams. Championed by finance teams as well as progressive CMOs and agencies, Proof calculates the performance of marketing and communications investments, including audience impact, business value creation, time to value, materiality and risk, ROI and opportunity cost. www.proofanalytics.ai