7 things to say when you’re asked to show ROI
Here's a handy menu for answering the inevitable ROI question
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight brand, marketing, and creative learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).
Wishing you a great week!
7 ways to respond to inevitable ROI questions
You know the pang of fear when the Slack dots start dancing. [Your boss] is typing… and the DM is never super great. What fury hath Slack hell wrought today? For in-house marketers, it’s usually a request to prove the ROI of a new project or a program or tool or, in today’s constantly precarious economic state, the ROI of a human being! “What has content done for us lately?” is a thinly veiled attempt at masking the real question of “Should we lay off Jeremy?”
Poor Jeremy. Poor marketers!
More so today than at any other time in recorded history since the advent of cookies (digital ones), marketers are under pressure to prove their worth by connecting output to dollars.
When the inevitable ROI conversations come your way, here are some answers you can turn to.
1 - Get ahead of the ROI question by sending a weekly recap email with all you’ve done that week.
Often, the ROI question is borne from a place of low information. If your boss does not know what you are doing, it stands to reason they might wonder how valuable your contributions are.
By sending a weekly recap email, you can be proactive with “managing up” to your boss, letting them know all the things you’ve shipped and the progress you’ve made, putting in a metric or two when relevant, and pointing out to them the exact places you could use their help. This email should take no more than 5-10 minutes to send—in fact, you can even put it in a Slack message or Slack audio, depending on the medium your boss is most likely to consume.
The weekly recap email is especially popular among senior leaders who are communicating up to a CEO boss, keeping a log of the work in their department so that the busy CEO doesn’t have to ever wonder. The internet is full of templates and guidance on how to put together a summary email like this. Here are some examples:
One of my favorites is The weekly CEO email, which is technically for CEOs who write summary emails to their teams, not vice versa. But the format is great and worth copying; it goes like this: 1) top of mind, 2) performance, 3) miscellaneous. And in fact, you are indeed the CEO of your own programs, projects, and workplace influence. Be the CEO you’ve always dreamed of! /shudders
2 - “Here’s the company OKR, and here’s my goal that ladders up to it.”
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are one of startupland’s most time-honored traditions. And by time-honored, I mean they require a lot of time to honor the lengthy process of agreeing on OKRs. I have been in quarterly OKR planning periods that lasted two months, and I need not point out that quarters themselves last only three months in total. If you are spending so much time aligning your teams on OKRs, whether you’re spending months or weeks or any number of hours in between, you are well within your rights to remind your boss that the impact of your work ties back to the goal-setting process the company undertook very very recently. And will undertake again in, probably, a day or two! (The next quarter is always nigh.)
OKRs typically build up like this:
O: Objective - A subjective, qualitative statement of ambition
KR: Key Results - Measurable, quantifiable goals that help you achieve that ambition
Activities that you’re committing to that will help you achieve those measurable goals
If you are in the midst of a quarter of work and are being asked about your ROI, you can simply point to the OKRs and where your work fits.
If you are in an OKR planning session and asked how your work can help your company achieve its big Os and number-y KRs, then brainstorm some projects and campaigns that ladder up to the company’s most important, business critical areas.
And if your company doesn’t have OKRs, then, well, um, see #7.
3 - “My program brings in 1,500 new trials and $200,000 ARR per month.”
This is the dream state. It’s clear, powerful…and elusive. It’s the great white whale of ROI answers. If there’s not fanfic about brand marketer Captain Ahab chasing first-touch attribution data, then there should be. (And guess what we’re writing in next week’s newsletter!)
This type of specific ROI reporting is rare especially for roles where measurement can be tricky. But if you need to put some quantifiable oomph behind your efforts, you can turn to metrics like these:
ARR / MRR contribution, typically measured per-channel by either first-touch or last-touch attribution, meaning whatever channel a paying customer touched first or last is the one that gets all the credit. If you’re a social media manager, look at how many customers came from TikTok or LinkedIn, and claim that revenue for your work.
Traffic by source. You can apply conversion rates on this traffic to approximate a signup or revenue total.
Increase in brand mentions
Increase in branded keyword search
The list could go on and on. The rule of thumb with creating a KPI for your ROI is to craft one that is as close to revenue as possible: ideally an ARR, MRR, or pipeline figure, or a number of leads or signups. Other numbers are great, too, provided they are numbers that your boss and company care about and understand.
If brand measurement is something you want to dig deeper into, we’ve got you covered. We’ve written two mini courses about the topic: how to measure brand ROI and how to advocate for the immeasurable components of brand. These mini course are cheap, cheap, cheap on Gumroad right now if you’re interested!
(We’ve also got resources for brand reach, brand health, and brand metrics—or a bundle of all the stuff together.)
4 - “You know, not everything can be measured. And that’s okay.”
Welcome to the gray area, where vibes are metrics and brand is the long game. Some of the most meaningful marketing work—brand trust, emotional resonance, making your audience not hate you—is notoriously hard to quantify. But that doesn’t make it any less real.
When someone asks about ROI on, say, a thought leadership series or a rebrand, feel free to gently push back and to do your best to gently educate or, likely, re-educate about how a holistic marketing strategy works. It needs emotional, psychological, heart-oriented impact to balance all the mind-oriented, productized bottom line output. And oh by the way, all that emotional, psychological, mushy stuff actually makes the performance marketing and the outbound work even better.
We’ve written a lot about this topic before, so feel free to grab something from our archives to use as a shield when you’re giving the “not everything can be measured” answer. Or check out the full course for lots, lots more.
5 - “I need XYZ in place in order to measure.”
Sometimes you can’t measure ROI because you’re flying blind. Maybe you don’t have the right tracking. Maybe the sales team isn’t logging leads. Maybe your CRM is a (gulp!) Excel spreadsheet.
In that case, flip the script: “I’d love to show ROI. Here’s what I need in order to do that.” This moves the conversation from scrutiny to solutions—and ideally, gets you some budget or resourcing to actually close the loop.
6 - “In lieu of XYZ, can we agree on what success looks like here?”
When hard data isn’t possible, soft alignment is your best friend. Get crisp on the goal before launch. Is success brand awareness? Community growth? Content production volume? These outcomes might feel distant from traditional dollars-and-cents ROI, but the most important thing is that the outcome is something your boss agrees is appropriate.
Establishing shared expectations up front lets you define ROI in qualitative terms and makes postmortem reviews way less painful. It also could give you some easy material for that weekly email summary!
7 - Leave.
Of course, there’s always the Press In Case of Emergency button.
You can just leave.
Find a new job, take a career sabbatical, write that book you’ve always wanted to write. Life is too precious to spend it justifying a job you were hired to do.
(Interested in discovering what that next job might look like for you? Join our digital community for career design, or join the waitlist for an upcoming in-person Bonfire retreat.)
Over to you
How do you handle the question of ROI? Which of the above ideas have worked or not worked in the past? We’d love to hear from you!
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