The Data That Will Guarantee Your Marketing Budget Increase - But There’s a Catch

The right data can prove beyond doubt the role of your advertising campaigns in customer acquisition success. However, when it comes to using these insights to increase investment in what works, data will only get you so far. Convincing your C-Suite to give you more budget based on this data can only be achieved with the most persuasive of presentations. 

Sure, you know how to present to your Board. But have you ever come away with the budget you wanted? CMOs at world leading brands share how they did.

The Data You Need to Present Marketing ROI to Your Board

Despite consistently naming ROI as the #1 KPI that matters to their Boards, few marketing teams are able to match leadership expectations. The 2024 Marketing Week/Kantar Language of Effectiveness research project saw 40% of marketers report that their organisation rarely or never measures the extent to which a campaign has driven pipeline growth.

The CMO Council reveals that 91% of marketers acknowledge the importance of responding to insights at speed in their role, but that 55% only have slight or moderate confidence in their data analytics and insights.

CMOs report that their teams use 14 or more data sources. You don’t need more data - you need less. Kill off most of your metrics, and kill them fast. Create your Board reports from scratch to work out the best sources of short- and longer-term data that are actually relevant for the market and customer insights you need to best target and engage your ICP.

The metrics you choose are just as important as those you don’t. The Data and Marketing Association (DMA) finds that 41% of marketing reporting constitutes ‘vanity metrics’, meaning that marketers are making ‘no significant progress’ in the measurement of real campaign impact. Page views and impressions fall firmly into this category as data that can show huge spikes in campaign attention, which may make hardworking marketers feel good about their latest copy or creative updates, but which offer no insight into the effectiveness of this copy or creative in triggering the desired customer action. Popularity of webinars and events may catch the attention of sales teams and business leaders at first, but quickly frustrates when it becomes clear that there is no meaningful link between events attendance and actually purchasing from a brand.

Clearly define and divide what your marketing team uses to develop insights that inform decision-making, versus what you take to the Board. Strip back your campaign performance reporting to share with your Board only the data that either: has a direct impact on short- and medium- term sales; or demonstrates long-term value creation by building a strong brand that influences target customer groups. 

Marketing leaders who select the right data are setting their teams up for success and can easily demonstrate the impact of this success to their Boards. Asmita Dubey, L’Oreal Chief Digital Marketing Officer and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Marketer of the Year 2024, secured a €13.4 billion budget by delivering and demonstrating the impact of marketing activities on the company’s three consecutive years of double-digit growth. Dubey shares, ‘People in advertising have been doing copy-testing for 50 years. They constantly ask themselves: ‘What part of it do I want to change, and what part of it do I want to take a risk with?’ That is not a new question. These are now data-driven decisions — but they’re not data determined.

‘The new generation of marketeers have to use both the left brain and the right brain, because creativity and technology have never come together as close as they are today.’ Dubey believes that carefully selecting and rigorously improving the quality of the right data is imperative to the creative testing and learning that drives the best results. ‘In our typical mathematical style, we have created a standardised index. The modelling has to be at a franchise level. It has to be weekly. It has to be long-term. We have to keep improving the quality of that data, so that when we make a data-driven decision, it is better.’

After rejecting the data sources and metrics that won’t provide your Board with meaningful insights, work out the best data to present to your leadership team by aligning with the metrics and methods they use themselves. Look at the dashboards presented by other C-Suite stakeholders in Board meetings to see what they measure, and which of this is most useful to and valued by your senior colleagues.  Align your KPIs to their goals, with results-based rather than activity-based metrics that show how testing and learning are paying off and communicating creativity as fundamental to revenue generation. Use realistic rather than optimistic numbers to help cautious finance-focused leaders feel more comfortable with projections and build up trust when you consistently deliver on promises to meet (and exceed!) expectations long-term.

How to Present Your Marketing Data: Convince Your Board to Support Increased Advertising Spend

Get the Marketing Data You Need By Working with Data Partners

Find and collaborate with expert data partners who can help you and your team:

• Look more closely, and more holistically, at the consumer journey than ever before. Last-click and traditional attribution models don’t account for many earlier touchpoints in the buyer’s journey, such as upper-funnel searches that help the prospect get to the searches typically initiated closer to a conversion, meaning your marketing team’s reporting will be disconnected from the full customer view. Your tech stack will need to be designed specifically around providing the data you need and enabling your team to visualise and act on meaningful insights.

• Leverage relationships with other internal departments to access data that already exists across your organisation. 40% of business-critical data remains trapped in data silos, presenting a major opportunity to uncover new insights and add value to other functions in the business. Democratise data to empower collaborative ways of working that provide a fuller picture of the consumer journey and touchpoints at every part of the business for maximum effectiveness and efficiencies. 

• Uncover hidden insights with more extensive data that is both more granular and reveals a wider picture of advertising campaign effectiveness. Get broader context to limited information on customers and marketing efforts, including contextual data on location, economy, industry and competitors.

• Update campaigns in real-time without waiting weeks for an end result. Data partners can provide insights in minutes at any point in any campaign, so advertising teams can test, experiment and learn in-flight. Real-time insights enable fast scaling up or down as needed, best setting up your teams to optimise messaging and creative for long-term campaign success.

Create & Present the Business Case to Increase Your Marketing Budget

Data partners also play a vital role in creating the business case that demonstrates return on ad spend and helps drive forward your quest to get more budget. Build and deliver a presentation that wins you the marketing budget you need:

• Start With The Why - Take inspiration from Simon Sinek’s famous leadership strategy by posing a powerful statement or question to grab the interest of your Board at the very beginning. A CEO can be presented with nothing more interesting than their number one fear or goal, with a brief idea that claims to eliminate their problem or achieve their target. Be bold and personal from the start, explain that your presentation will demonstrate exactly how you’ll achieve your major goal, and continually refer to it with every point you make to keep the Board engaged.

• Show the Risk of Doing Nothing - In tackling the problem to be solved, reinforce the value of your solution in the minds of your leadership by bringing them face-to-face with potential failure. Explore the scenarios of different actions: the worst option would be to continue as you currently are, which is doing nothing to address let alone solve the problem at hand. List out the negative impact of this scenario such as company damage and lost revenue. Follow this up with a middle option to mitigate the worst of the drawbacks, and finally present the third option of dedicating the budget and resources you need to provide the best solution, with all the ways this solution will positively impact revenue and business growth.

• Be Clear & Simple - One graph that reinforces your argument is better than ten that confuse or detract. Beware of the temptation to share positive results that are valuable in terms of insights for your team or lower-level activity-based KPIs, but that don’t help your Board connect advertising investment to customer acquisition and revenue generation. Show only the data that clearly demonstrates ROI, reinforces your point, and is understandable to all Board members. Ruthlessly cut out anything that overcomplicates, misleads or distracts from your path to demonstrate return.

• Proactively Ask For What You Need - Simply outline the costs and risks associated with each additional budget element that you’re asking for. Level with your colleagues: they know it costs money to make money, and transparency around realistic spending will create a better basis for a conversation founded on trust. Use a cost/benefit analysis [LINK TO PREVIOUS BLOG] to demonstrate the opportunity, how you’ll fully take advantage of it, and the vast benefits compared to the investment involved. Share how your advertising campaigns and marketing activities will deliver insights that will positively impact every C-Suite member’s department.

  
  

Answer Your Leadership’s Burning Questions

Jill Kramer, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at Accenture and one of Forbes’ Most Influential Marketers of 2024, believes that CMOs should embrace Board uncertainty of marketing ROI and reframe reporting at a fundamental level in a way that really matters to the leadership team. ‘You need to know what question you're trying to answer. The data is the way to answer the question. Many businesses are guilty of trying to use data to answer a question before they really know if it’s the right question. One of my favourite questions is: what if we didn't? Connect and start with creativity.'

Creating a question-and-answer story around marketing data involves leadership teams in marketing reporting, and helps them to understand the true ROI represented by marketing data.

Directly Involve & Collaborate With Your C-Suite

Co-op’s Chief Membership and Customer Officer at Co-Op, Kenyatte Nelson, believes in building ‘phenomenal’ C-Suite relationships by delivering ‘clarity of communication’ alongside ROI. ‘If you're going to be a really great marketeer, you have to get comfortable listening and tuning your ears outward and your eyes outward. It's about creating a listening culture, not a telling culture. Bring someone to the table, let them talk and listen to them.’

Pull your senior stakeholders into the conversation about marketing ROI from the very beginning by building strong relationships founded on understanding. Strike up conversations with C-Suite colleagues and be as inquisitive about them as you are about your customer base: what are their biggest pain points and goals?

When you’ve built a mental persona of your colleagues, get a better idea of their understanding of marketing: how they see the function, the value they believe it delivers and what they would most need to see from you to better recognise this value. With better understanding you can tailor your Board presentations to pique the interest, allay the worries and show how marketing will deliver against the goals of each C-Suite member. 

Speak Your Board’s Language to Demonstrate Effectiveness

Data and insights will help to persuade your Board of marketing ROI, but must be communicated in the right way to influence supportive action. From your direct conversations with Board members, listen to the language they use and adapt to their ways of speaking. Use phrases they are more familiar with in their day-to-day roles and talk in definite, business-related and financial terms rather than abstracts and theories. Rely on fewer data points that you discuss in more detail, and refer every data point/insight back to the bottom line so your leadership team receives the message that all marketing performance is directly and positively impacting business growth.

Former CEO and seasoned Board member of multiple FTSE 100 companies, Chelsea Grayson advises marketing leaders to balance the performance and brand sides of reporting to demonstrate ROI: ‘Boards aren’t stupid. They see why you need to do brand marketing and why you must develop passion and warmth for a brand. CMOs would do well to talk in terms of profitable revenue generation and net and gross margins. They should have conversations about EBITDA and how they’re contributing to the company’s P&L. They should come across more like financial planning and analysis executives than marketers.’

Find the Right Data Partner to Accurately Measure & Communicate Return on Ad Spend

If traditional attribution models show an inaccurate picture of advertising ROI, how can your team build the right one?

ViewersLogic harnesses unique single-source data to directly connect media exposure with online and offline purchases on the same individuals. CMOs can measure the entire journey from ad exposure to purchase, to reveal unprecedented visibility into customer acquisition.

Empower your marketing team to both prove ROI and continually improve marketing-driven results.