Why measuring quickly poses challenges for digital marketers
Marketers deliver tremendous and often unrecognised value to their business. Yes, you read that correctly: unrecognised. Value is a complex concept that makes it hard to measure and even harder to showcase throughout an organisation.
The digital age is awash in data that demonstrates the power of marketing to build brand, produce engagement, generate leads, and boost revenue. So why do marketers still struggle to prove their value and demonstrate ROI?
Recently, LinkedIn conducted research, surveying over 4,000 digital marketers across the globe. And we found that digital marketers are struggling — struggling to calculate their impact, share that impact with key stakeholders, and market that impact across their organisations. This happens because digital marketers are under pressure — from stakeholders and the broader business — to deliver results quickly.
Seventy percent of global digital marketers claim to be measuring digital ROI today, but we’ve found that they are measuring this impact long before a sales cycle has concluded. It suggests that many marketers are likely not to measure ROI at all.
The research we share below identifies key marketer behaviours as it relates to measurement and ROI, delves deeper into their motivations, and concludes with best practices for you to consider.
Measuring too soon: Digital marketers often measure ROI too quickly
Mixing metrics: When ROI is measured too quickly (i.e. in less time than the length of the sales cycle), the metric measured is not actually ROI. In fact, the metric measured is a KPI. These KPIs are then leveraged to prove value instead of ROI.
Marketing under pressure: Internal pressures such as tight budget allocation cycles and proof of performance force marketers to measure and report ROI too soon.
Missing out on self-promotion: Rushing to measure ROI often results in lower marketer-confidence in this metric and less motivation to share it.
- Measuring too soon
One of the key findings of our survey is that digital marketers are trying to prove ROI in a shorter amount of time than the length of their sales cycle. We know that the typical B2B sales cycle can last anywhere from one month to two years — but the average B2B sales cycle usually takes place over six months or more, especially as marketers focus on brand building marketing objectives.
And yet, our research shows that digital marketers attempt to measure the ROI of their programs almost immediately. Why is this problem? Well, the full return on a campaign cannot be accurately determined until after the sales cycle is completed. For example, how can you determine the value of the leads you’ve produced as a demand generation organisation unless you know how many of those leads converted into customers?
LinkedIn’s research shows the tendency to measure performance shortly after a marketing program’s launch.
We know that 77% of digital marketers are measuring return within the first month of their campaign. And within that group, over 52% of digital marketers knowingly had a sales cycle that was three months or more.
Even more surprising, only 4% of digital marketers measure ROI over a six-month period or longer, which is the duration we know to be more in line with the length of a typical B2B sales cycle.
We see this trend irrespective of marketing objectives — whether or not a marketer is focused on brand building or customer acquisition.
Through this research, what we started to notice is that marketers are using KPIs and other success metrics to report ROI and long term value.
- Mixing metrics
When digital marketers begin to think about ROI measurement, it can feel natural to gravitate towards commonly used marketing metrics, such as traffic and clicks. While these metrics might be more readily available, they aren’t really measuring ROI.
Source: LinkedIn
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