Marketing ROI

Decker Marketing has a great post that includes 10 points on a Marketing ROI Culture:

1. At most marketing meetings there is a calculator present.

2. Finance and marketing know each other well enough now to go out to lunch…at least once in a while!

3. You have (or need) a focused marketing operations analyst (data reporting and analysis)

4. You have a marketing dashboard reporting daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly marketing results vs. forecast

5. This dashboard (and source data) is available to anyone, anytime -- and is presented to management at least weekly.

6. The numbers on this dashboard include P&L-relevant measures (revenue, expense, margin) -- not just clicks, calls, leads, etc.

7. The marketing department’s shared drive stores many Excel spreadsheets – perhaps more Excel files than Powerpoint presentations or Acrobat pdfs combined!

8. The executive summary of any marketing presentation is 60% numbers. The remaining is 80% numbers and graphs.

9. Senior management understands and recalls the actual and forecasted marketing measures (i.e. response rates, conversion, revenue per circ, total marketing revenue, etc.)

10. You start performance planning and reviews in Microsoft Excel before you use Microsoft Word.

The list above is all great, but here’s my number 1 (number 0, if you wish):

Your marketing manager better use the word “return” in conversation; especially in conversations regarding marketing spending.