How to Report on How Efficient You Are in Driving Pipeline and/or Revenue
A Return on Investment (ROI) report is designed to help marketers determine the amount of revenue each of their marketing activities generates for the business, all channels included (both offline and online).
Why You'd Use This Report
Marketers should use an ROI report when trying to get a holistic overview of what channels, content, or campaigns are delivering the most revenue for the business, in order to make data-driven decisions around where to best spend their overall marketing budget. These types of reports include more than just paid advertisements, and consider marketing spend for activities such as Events, Email Marketing, Webinars, Organic Search, Website Traffic, Paid Social, Paid Search, Content Syndication, and more.
WHO THIS is valuable for
Depending on the size of your organization, you may have different stakeholders. If you're a small business or midsize enterprise, this data will be valuable for:
- Demand Generation teams
- Marketing Analysts
- VPs of Marketing
- Chief Marketing Officers
- AVPs, VPs of Sales, Chief Revenue Officers
If you're an Enterprise organization, you can expect this data to be valuable for all of the above roles, aside from AVPs, VPs of Sales, and Chief Revenue Officers.
DATA You Need
- Marketing Spend, broken out by channel
- Primary Campaign Source
- Opportunities and Pipeline Created (Closed Won, Closed Lost)
- Time Frame (based on touchpoint)
data sources required
- Marketing Automation Platform (Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Pardot, etc)
- CRM (Salesforce, SAP, etc)
- Ad Platform Cost Actuals
- Google Sheets (or equivalent) Budget
Key Characteristics of a ROI Report
1. Automate As Much of the Cost Actuals as Possible
With many of the ad platforms B2B marketers use today, cost data is pretty easy to acquire. And if you have the platforms connected you'll be able to pull in your spend into the report. These ad platforms are great for spend and TOF performance metrics, but you'll need to tie it to your marketing automation and CRM to really be able to look at ROI.
2. Use Google Sheets for Everything Else
For the cost actuals that you're unable to automate -- think technology and people spend -- populate a google sheet with your budget AND actuals. Simply update the google sheet and your ROI report dashboards should update daily. This will allow you to have one central place where you can make updates and be confident that your ROI reports will adjust as well. This makes monthly department and quarterly board reporting much easier.
3. Run Different ROI Models
There are a number of different ways to slice ROI. You might do it "fully loaded" -- everything that makes up marketing spend including people and technology. But you'll also want to look at ROI in a more granular way -- by channel or by campaign. So, our recommendation at CaliberMind is to create a series of reports that tie into one dashboard that reflect as much.
Here's an Example of a ROI Report in CaliberMind
More Playbooks
The Weekly Revenue Marketing Report
Sign up to receive a weekly personalized email from Camela Thompson, the host of the Revenue Marketing Report.