“Let’s move everything to the channels with the best ROI,” suggested a CFO to a CMO at a $75mm SaaS brand. “Not so fast,” replied the seasoned CMO, “marketing doesn’t work that way.” A painful conversation ensued. As usual, I had questions.
Should CMOs Look at Performance by Channel?
Of course. Most importantly, it can identify trends over time. A channel that worked well for you last year might be underperforming this year due to macro issues. For example, many B2B brands are seeing drops in organic search traffic and increased costs for paid search. Some of this is caused by the rise of LLMs, including in Google searches.
But even with this example, it’s not that simple. Search performance is also directly linked to top-of-mind brand awareness. In my recent podcast interview with Jason Ing, CMO of Gusto, he shared that their search (both paid and organic) performance improved dramatically this year as they increased spending on brand advertising (specifically, promoted videos on linear TV, YouTube, and social channels).
Should CMOs Share Channel Performance Data With Other Execs?
Not if they can help it. Sharing this data with executives who don’t understand the interconnectedness of marketing activities will jump to faulty conclusions, like, “Let’s put all our money into search since that’s the most effective lead source.”
Like Search, Email is another channel that, in isolation, can easily be misinterpreted. Sarah Jordan, the CMO of Constant Contact, a leading email service provider, recently shared, “Open rates of emails can increase dramatically when coupled with multichannel marketing activities.” Case in point – On Monday, I saw an ad for a new type of Allbirds (my secret obsession) on Instagram, and then an email arrived inviting me to an event at their SOHO store. Sold. When I show up at the store, they’ll attribute it to the email. It's not wrong, but it's also not the whole story.
Sure, that’s a B2C story. One impulse buyer. Short sales cycle. B2B sellers face buying committees and longer sales cycles. But that only means that you need more touches via more channels to advance and close the sale.
Since Data Must Be Shared With Other Executives, How Do You Avoid Getting Granular?
Start by aligning with Sales. Better yet, create a plan that will make Sales love you. On an episode of CMO Huddles Studio,
Kelly Hopping, CMO of Demandbase, noted that everyone on her team knows their role in generating Sales love. Explains Hopping, “It doesn’t mean that everything is optimized for Sales or bottom of the funnel pipeline – it means we give them a brand that they love, content that’s easy to consume and share, events that they’re proud to invite their customer to, etc.”
Once Sales understands how the pieces fit together, you can then jointly share metrics on a campaign level or a multi-quarter basis. Ideally, these include blended measures of brand strength AND pipeline health.
What metrics are you sharing?
Written by Drew Neisser
