Almost every marketing so called guru, yours truly included, will bang on about calculating an ROI from your investment in marketing.
Marketing like any other investment should seek a return, and there should be accountability for those numbers.
Almost nobody will disagree.
The challenge is how you do it.
How do you attribute an outcome to any specific activity or individually weighted group of activities?
The amount spent divided by the sales, or margin returned from that activity.
Pretty easy in the case of a piece of machinery, another matter entirely for anything beyond a specific tactical action, such as an ad in Facebook or Google where the response can be counted.
In the case of marketing investment, how do you allocate the sales outcome to that activity?
When a sale is generated, was it because of the activity we are calculating for, or was it the phone call from the sales rep, attractive copy on the website, clean delivery truck, or the referral from some other satisfied customer?
How can we tell?
When some analytics nerd cracks the code on attribution, he will become histories fastest billionaire.
So, when some fast talker promising world market domination will result from investing in their new ‘thing’, run as fast as you can, unless they can prove they are the one who cracked the attribution code, which I do not expect any time soon.
