"Things ain't what they used to be" - well not in marketing anyway!

With the plethora of platforms, tools, and measurements at our disposal how on earth do we choose what works for us?

Today most marketing departments are simply plate spinning, and when it comes to focus on ROI most choose vanity over sanity metrics when reporting into the board. 

And when it comes to putting marketing budgets together how do they answer the question from finance who always ask "what's the revenue forecast for this" before it's signed off?

A question that always amuses me because it's easy to put numbers behind things we've already done and got the data points to review the ROI. 

Just to hammer this point home (maybe you can share it with your board colleagues), I've provided a link (below) to a great piece I found that looks at 100 different data points from numerous marketing and social media platforms, talk about plate spinning!

So when it comes to 'Social Media' how do we explain the ROI on something that most businesses still don't really understand?

The answer is: You can't because you don't really have a social strategy. 

When we say our conversion rate is 3% what we mean is we have a 97% failure rate.

Sure you can show that we spent x on these adverts and got y back, we can show what we think is our share of voice in comparison to our competitors, but in reality its just a huge guessing game because from what we can evidence, most companies haven't a clue what a solid 'Social Media' strategy really is. 

And they certainly haven't a clue how much of the paid media budget is going into the hands of ad tech fraud.