Moving Away from Tracking Direct ROI

If your leadership expects direct ROI on every marketing dollar, you are in a tough spot.

Here's what I recommend to teams facing this:

1. Explain to leadership that you understand the need to track ROI and use the budget wisely.

2. Educate them that some activities (give examples) build brand awareness but they don't show immediate, direct ROI.

3. Suggest splitting out a % of your monthly budget for awareness tactics that won't be measured in your ROI, CPL, etc. Start small and work from your existing budget. Don't ask for more.

4. Commit to tracking the awareness spend separately with the only metric(s) being impressions/reach.

5. Make a plan to circle back after 6 months to review.

What typically happens is that you are able to show that you are still generating leads/revenue, tracking ROI closely, and have good unit economics, but have also picked up a lot of extra awareness/reach.

From there you can start to have open/strategic conversations about how to allocate budget & think about longer-term impact.