Cracking the Code: The Perpetual Challenge of Measuring Marketing ROI for B2B Marketers

One of Ashlye Bradford’s favorite marketing adages is, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

The famed quote from Macy’s founder John Wanamaker highlights the historical challenge of accurately measuring marketing’s impact. Today, with advanced analytics and technology, marketers like Bradford, Marketing Director for Parsec Automation Corp., seem to be inching closer to solving the age-old riddle, but it remains a complex endeavor, especially in the B2B space.

A serial connector and collaborator, Bradford oversees a team of designers, writers and promoters that help ensure Parsec’s marketing initiatives are consistent and innovative, all the while enhancing every aspect of the customer experience. When it comes to measuring the impact of marketing on revenue, Bradford sizes the challenge up to several factors.

Chief among the challenges is data, especially regarding policy and management. Stricter data privacy laws like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) continue to limit the accessibility and use of customer data, which complicates ROI management. “Within an organization, data often resides in silos across various marketing platforms and channels,” Bradford says. “Without data centralization, it’s difficult for marketers to obtain a comprehensive view of the customer journey and revenue impact.”

Another challenge relates to modern customer engagement. In the Digital Age, customers engage with brands through multiple touchpoints—e.g., blog posts, social media, whitepapers, etc.—before making a purchase. While this multi-prong approach does wonders for building brand loyalty, it makes it difficult for marketers to attribute revenue to specific marketing efforts.

Finally, marketers face category-specific challenges in quantifying marketing impact. For example, in enterprise software, marketers often see extended sales cycles—sometimes deals take months or even years to close. This delay makes it challenging to directly correlate marketing activities with revenue.

“Traditional measurement methods like ROI calculators and attribution models can no longer keep up with today’s complex, digital-first customer engagement,” Bradford says. “They don’t adequately capture the full customer journey and the impact of factors like brand awareness and long-term relationships. These legacy tools often lack the granularity to differentiate between various channels and tactics, making it difficult to effectively allocate resources.”

The scope of customer engagement and measuring its impact depends on what sector you play in. In the ever-expanding world of marketing, there are several differences between B2B and B2C. One major difference lies in the customer pipeline. In the B2B world, the customer pipeline tends to involve relatively long sales cycles, complex buyer journeys and a concerted focus on relationship building. These efforts all require a relatively nuanced and customized ROI measurement process.

By comparison, the B2C pipeline tends to be more straightforward and transactional. B2C marketers often lean more toward short-term ROI, versus B2B’s emphasis on longer-term customer lifetime value (CLV).

“In my view, it comes down to internal processes,” Bradford says. “B2B decisions often require consensus among multiple stakeholders, whereas B2C marketing purchases are typically more individualistic. These differing strategies translate to different measurement approaches. B2B marketers tend to work with smaller and more defined customer bases, requiring more personalized tracking and measurement. B2C customer bases are often larger, lending themselves to broader measurement methodologies.”

Eye on the Prize

As a strategic planner at BBDO New York and GSD&M, Chris Kocek has spent his career working with some of the most iconic brands in the world. Depending on the day and project, Kocek and his team helped forge strategies for AARP, Monster.com, Lowe’s, Hyatt Hotels, Ace Hardware, John Deere, and scores of others.

Today, as founder and CEO of Gallant Branding, Kocek focuses his attention on the worlds of retail, food and beverage, hospitality, and more, working on new product launches and brand overhauls. Sitting at the top of his to-do list is calculating the data-driven analysis these campaigns deliver on the way to forming national recognition.

With so many channels to measure, Kocek admits that some don’t offer an immediate one-to-one impact on lead gen or revenue. For example, a marketing team can spend a lot of time creating social media content and measure engagements such as likes, comments, shares, etc., but rarely do those actions translate into immediate conversions in the form of product purchases. “If you get a like or a comment, that doesn’t necessarily mean the person is interested in buying a product or service. It could just mean they agree with something you said. There often can be quite a bit of distance between agreement and purchase intent, so it can be difficult to discern genuine interest from all the noise.”

The biggest obstacles Kocek and his team encounter tend to center on modeling and consistency. First, they have to create a reliable reporting model—something that shows if a prospect takes the five to 10 steps from social to search to the website to your email nurture sequence. Too often, there is an X% probability they will fill out your form or buy your product. Most businesses don’t take the time to set up those kinds of measurement goals to really understand those customer pathways with the highest conversion rates.

The second obstacle is consistency and real-time reporting. Often, businesses will try a variety of different marketing activations—paid search, social media campaigns, event activations, influencer partnerships—without consistently focusing on the results of each activation.
“Consistent, real-time reporting is critical if you want to see what’s working and what’s not so that you can avoid wasting money,” Kocek says. “When it comes to measurement, it’s like a lot of businesses are driving with a GPS turned on (reporting), but they’re only looking at it once every 30 minutes (delayed reporting), which means they miss valuable information that could help them navigate and adapt much more quickly.”

In a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is rising to the forefront, Kocek says that marketers must be cognizant of the fact that they still have to do the work. “Yes, AI will help, but you still have to know what your goals are. You still have to know what you’re looking for within the data to help you set your navigation. AI won’t tell you what gems are hiding in your data. You have to prompt it. You have to know what questions to ask in the first place to tease out the insights that are hiding.”

In the end, everything starts with data-driven benchmarks. What do you really know about the customers who have purchased from you? What are the actual pathways that led them to you and what messages did you use or test at various points of the journey that increased or decreased the close rate?

“You have to set up your measurement system so that you can be methodical and not just throw creative noodles against the wall in the hopes that one of them sticks,” Kocek says. “And you still have to have marketing and sales working hand-in-hand. Your sales teams’ experience with potential customers can provide valuable information that can lead to more effective headlines and optimized placement.

If your departments aren’t integrated when it comes to marketing, it’s like trying to drive a car where one hand is turning the wheel one way and the other hand is trying to turn the wheel the other way.”
For today’s marketers, cracking the code continues to be a practice of traditional marketing strategies married with innovative ways to get what a brand needs. Your success depends on it.