What ROI can I expect?
Gillian Bardsley
Marketing Specialist | Been there, done that, designed the t-shirt | Strategy, Design & Copywriting | Let’s get your marketing sorted!
I get enquiries from businesses looking to outsource individual elements of marketing. Some may ask me to do their social media, some might want me to design a new website, some might have me writing their blogs, but it’s really only those who work with me holistically as a fractional CMO that have the right to ask that question. Let me explain why.
For each of these marketing activities in isolation, return on investment is really hard to quantify in some industries. Note I said, "some industries", because of course some businesses probably can trace a lead back to a specific piece of marketing.
But for businesses who don’t necessarily sell online, or who have a long, elaborate sales process, it could literally be years between a customer seeing your business for the first time and buying something from you.?
Take my ex employer Ferranti as an example, I worked for them for nearly 10 years and in that time a typical customer project could take anywhere from 1 year to 10 years before being converted.
During that time, they probably checked out our website on numerous occasions, we sent them proposals, maybe two or three re-quotes, they visited us at exhibitions, maybe three times in some cases, they met with our BD team, and we repeated that cycle until they eventually signed a contract with us.
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So, where do you allocate the ROI?
None of the individual parts did the work in isolation. They all contributed. If, at any part of the journey, one of those elements had let the business down, or didn’t sell it in the right way, that customer would have walked away. So, it’s the whole journey, every single touchpoint, that has to be right, in order for it to work.
So when you think about outsourcing parts of your marketing, you need to make sure you have a way to quantify the broader picture or at least an acceptance that you might not always be able to quantify the ROI on every little thing.
Rest assured though, everything you do will be making a contribution to your customers’ journey.?
What parts of your customer journey could be letting you down?