On December 2nd, David Ackert and Jason Miller (Director of Client Relations at Ryan Swanson) presented a webinar on Show Your Work: Connecting Marketing Dollars to ROI. Here’s some of the insights that were discussed.
Data is your most powerful assessment tool
87% of marketers feel that data is their organization’s most underused asset. And it’s easy to see why. Between email marketing, website analytics, social media analysis, finance reports, SEO optimization, win rates, and the day-to-day management of tasks, you can get lost in a sea of numbers, especially when there’s no way to distinguish the signal from the noise. With that said, underutilizing these resources is almost always a mistake. Data helps you tell the story of the impact you intend to have on your firm.
Using data to assess the impact of your initiatives can be as simple as tracking one or two metrics, establishing a baseline, and then tracking that on an ongoing basis. This can be invaluable especially for new initiatives, as it helps you decide how to course-correct throughout the year.
Not sure where to start? The success of your pipeline is often a great way to show marketing’s impact on the overall success of your firm. Reducing the dropoff rate as prospective clients move through the pipeline often translates to real, tangible effects on the bottom line when it comes to revenue.
Use Data to Plan
Once you have a good idea of where your department is having a measurable impact, you can begin to make a case for the initiatives you intend to implement throughout the year. Especially during budget season, presenting clear status reports makes for irrefutable evidence.
These reports can also help bring to the forefront the importance of the marketing function. Often, when marketing departments struggle to clearly show their impact on the firm’s bottom line, they can be undervalued at their firms. Worse, they can be subject to downsizing during times of financial stress. Thus, it is urgent to demonstrate the value your role contributes, and especially to reinforce the data in a way which your lawyers can understand.
Use data to tell the story of your success
PIPELINEPLUS is a simple and elegant solution to help you tell the story of your marketing success. With custom setup to help you isolate the metrics that really matter, and dedicated dashboards designed with easy reporting in mind, PIPELINEPLUS reduces the amount of time spent finding, cleaning, and analyzing data and instead gives you the intelligence you need in realtime. Find out how PIPELINEPLUS can help your firm today.
