Marketing and Finance have needed to bridge the ROI gap for years. We built an analytics "Golden Gate" to do just that.

No more hopping from rock to rock to get to provable impact. 

Yesterday, I was in Bozeman, Montana to speak at the #BigSkyBigIdeas marketing innovation conference. After I came off the stage, a top marketing leader approached me and started asking questions about multi-touch attribution. She used a very evocative visual to describe how secure she felt about her team's approach.

Her bridge of touches was made of disconnected pieces of data. Sometimes the rocks were pretty slippery, sometimes the distance between them was pretty big. It was the beginning of something, but the rocks by themselves did not inspire confidence.

I loved her analogy and so I extended it. "A real bridge must have strong supports, but without equally strong spans it isn't really a bridge. Spans are what connects everything. Spans are analytics, supports are data."

She needed something more like this.

For years and years, marketers and business leaders have been stuck on opposite sides of the water when it came to, well, almost anything. Today, most business leaders know they need marketing's services, but because they don't know marketing's value, they see it as a cost center to be policed constantly. Necessary, sure. But can we get it cheaper?

If you think I'm wrong about this, ask your CFO, CRO and COO.

But there's a big difference between not delivering value and being unable to prove it.

The analytics show that great marketing delivers tremendous business value that would not otherwise exist if they didn't exist. No other part of the company can replicate marketing's impact. Why? Let's take sales. Sales ROI is linear -- after a while, a C-suite knows that if they hire one more great sales guy, they'll probably get X more sales in Y time. But the value of great marketing is multiplicative.

That singular value is why marketing was created in the first place. Channels and techniques change, but the basis for marketing value is fundamentally unchanged.

The problem is not whether marketing delivers value. It's that most marketers still are unable to prove what that value is and how long it takes to create it, even with all the tools and data in their hands. Why? Because the proof lies in the "cause and effect" relationships between data sets, not the data sets themselves.

But those days are coming to a close. Proof Analytics is a unique analytics platform that bridges the divide between the C-suite and Marketing. It delivers the "cause and effect" analytics and the proof of value that both the CFO and CMO need in order to get the greatest returns.

As your marketing team moves into budget planning for 2019, they'll need a lot more than a bunch of stepping stones to connect with customers and prove their value. And there's no investment that brings #people, #purpose, and #prosperity together like a bridge.

#Marketing #Finance #Analytics #GoldenGate

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