What Is ROI Marketing?

What is ROI Marketing and How is it Different from Marketing ROI?

Aren’t you tired of asking “What is the contribution of our marketing efforts to the bottom line?” and not getting a concrete response? My goal is to help you answer that question. There is a proven method for managing marketing assets to achieve specific bottom-line business results. It is called ROI Marketing.

Marketing ROI Definition

We all know what marketing ROI means. It is the gain or loss generated by marketing projects. The result is measured by subtracting marketing costs from gross revenues. But while this is easy to say and simple to understand, it is not easy to monitor nor measure marketing ROI with any degree of accuracy.

Plenty of marketing gurus focus on ROI as their magical formula.   And almost everyone in the marketing profession talks about increasing, boosting, or delivering marketing ROI. But very few people have a defined path to fulfill their goals or to confidently measure their success.

The process of marketing planning today is not equipped to evaluate real returns. A marketing plan that focuses on the execution of activities, that appears and behaves as a cost, that uses media and channel indicators only, applying different performance gauges for different types of projects, will never be able to demonstrate its actual contribution to the business’ bottom-line, in cash. In the eyes of CEOs, CFOs, and business managers, marketing continues to appear intangible and of only tangential benefit to the business. It is time for this to change.

ROI Marketing Definition

It is time to innovate, not only in the technologies that marketing departments use, but also in the marketing management models. So, what is ROI Marketing? ROI Marketing is an innovative approach that puts the business at the center of marketing activities, forcing marketing planning to focus on results rather than on execution, to behave as an investment instead of as a cost, to speak the language of business rather than measuring communication indicators only, to finally have one common, comparable, robust, credible performance indicator… ROI.

This bottom-line approach to marketing is needed not only for big companies with huge marketing budgets; it is a must for small businesses, public and not-for-profit organizations, as well. At whatever scale, the future of the business is at stake. Just as not knowing if you are ill, does not make you healthy, so too, the fact that you do not know if your marketing projects are making money does not prevent your organization from bleeding cash.  What is the point of finding that out when it is already too late?

It is time for companies to embrace a marketing management model that makes marketing accountable to the business, that treats marketing projects as an investment portfolio, that evaluates all marketing projects with a bottom-line perspective.  It is time to embrace ROI Marketing!

Pablo Turletti, an internationally-recognized expert on marketing and sales efficiency and accountability, as well as a marketing keynote speaker, is the founder and CEO of ROI Marketing Institute (ROIMI), which has offices in Miami, Lucerne, and Madrid. ROI Marketing Institute helps companies around the world improve the efficiency of their marketing investments through precise measurement of the economic return on marketing activities. By directly connecting marketing projects and campaigns to a company’s bottom line, he helps turn them into true business investments. ROIMI provides a broad array of services, including auditing, competency-building, implementation support, consulting and research. Turletti is the author of the books ROI Marketing: The New Performance Standard and Marketing & Sales ROI: What Is It Good For? Learn more about the ROI Marketing Institute at roimarketinginstitute.com, and follow Pablo Turletti at twitter.com/pabloturletti or linkedin.com/in/pabloturletti/.