journey-in-action

Creating a ROI Dashboard to Track Marketing Effectiveness for an Oil and Gas Software Company

Problem:

Marketing spend is often a large part of commercialization expenses for new product launches, but understanding whether the expense is delivering the desired outcome requires a way to visualize the ROI.

Although there are many Marketing Performance Management (MPM) platforms such as Hive9 and our favorite, Allocadia, that are designed specifically to tackle this problem for marketers, it's a really good idea to begin tracking your marketing ROI on spreadsheet first. The reason for this is that most MPM programs require configuration so they can be tailored to your desired results and to the level of granularity and/or complexity your team can support. Working through some of these obstacles in advance of reviewing platforms, can help your organization select an application at a price point most relevant to your business. 

Solution:

For one of our clients commercializing a new software product for Oil and Gas, we developed a custom marketing ROI dashboard so they could visualize their marketing spend against specific business goals. Our ultimate objective was to learn which marketing tactics were most effective at reaching our target audience through experimentation while keeping our acquisition cost per lead low.

Collaborating with the client, we established a taxonomy and hierarchy under three primary programs of expense:

1. Pre-launch product marketing;
2. Brand awareness; and
3. Lead generation.

Each program was used to classify and allocate expenses so we could properly report and attribute the associated ROI. For example, the pre-launch product marketing program included costs associated with market research, website set up, product naming and other related expenses incurred prior to the commercial product launch.

After establishing our first tier programs, we then assessed the various campaigns and their respective tactics creating tier 2 and tier 3 categories. For example, under the brand awareness program, we included a category for print advertising (tier 2). This enabled visibility and filtering of the data by marketing program and then by marketing campaign. Going one step farther, we also created functional sub-categories (tier 3) so we could capture the total cost of creation for each tactic. For example, we could align graphics design time and expense to a specific piece of content or tactic; like a tradeshow graphic could be attributed to the specific tactic (XYZ exhibition) and also be allocated to the program (50% to lead generation and 50% to brand awareness).

Outcome:

The ROI dashboard was used to monitor and measure the effectiveness of their marketing programs against their business objectives. By setting these targets in advance of tactical marketing, we could evaluate if we were achieving our expected outcomes. For example, we measured the increase/decrease in website traffic as an outcome of our brand awareness program, and could clearly see which methods were driving the most traffic. 

Every week the performance of individual tactics were captured and evaluated against pre-established KPIs and industry standard returns. The dashboard offered a way for the business stakeholders to make decisions about their marketing investment and fine-tune or reallocate resources based on systematic, data-driven monitoring. As a visual aid, it also provided a vital tool for discussing marketing performance with upper management - transforming the conversation into how Marketing is helping the organization achieve business goals.

Without some way of measuring and optimizing the marketing tactical spend, the team would have been operating in the blind - spending valuable time and money on less productive tactics. The ROI dashboard gave them the ability to systematically test variables such as messaging, channel effectiveness, reach and a number of other factors that drive a more predictable sales cycle.