For What It’s Worth: Proving The Value Of Marketing To Those Most Skeptical

It’s not always easy to prove marketing’s inherent value to a client.

Sadly, sometimes marketing’s hardest sell can be to someone within your own company.

A recent Gartner survey asked senior marketing leaders who was most skeptical of marketing’s value at their company, finding that chief financial officers were both the No. 1 choice (19%) as well as in the sum Top 3 for 40%. CEOs were right behind them, with 17% of marketing leaders giving them the top spot and 39% putting them in the Top 3.

(Source: Gartner)

“One of the significant challenges in proving marketing’s value is dealing with entrenched beliefs and lack of understanding and alignment,” says Gartner’s Joseph Enever. “47% of CMOs said marketing is viewed as an expense rather than a strategic investment. Overcoming this barrier requires CMOs to provide persistent education and communication efforts to reshape these outdated perceptions and highlight marketing’s critical impact on the bottom line.”

Enever puts a spotlight on three metric types that help paint a deeper, more complete picture of marketing and “get more bang for their buck … to communicate value”:

• relationship metrics (like Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Cost)
• return on transactional metrics (like Cost Per Acquisition, Return on Ad Spend, and ROI​)
• operational metrics (like stakeholder satisfaction with deliverables, productivity of marketing resources)

“CMOs and other senior marketing leaders who incorporated two or more of these ‘high complexity’ metric types were up to 1.8 times more likely to prove value and get credit than those who used none of them,” Evener says, “and 1.4 times more likely than those who incorporated just one of them.”

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