Improve Marketing ROI
Why this is harder than it sounds
Marketing ROI looks like a measurement problem. It’s actually three problems wearing one trench coat. The data problem: the systems don’t talk to each other and the attribution model was never built. The problem: half the spend was never tied to a revenue outcome in the first place. It was tied to “presence” or “brand.”
The accountability problem: the people running the marketing don’t answer to the same number as the people running the business.Trying to fix marketing ROI by optimizing tactics is like trying to fix a leaky boat by rowing harder. The tactics are downstream of all three problems above.
Most companies try to improve ROI by optimizing the tactics. The problem is almost never the tactics.
The ad isn’t the problem. The landing page isn’t the problem. The email subject line isn’t the problem. These are the things vendors love to optimize because they’re visible, easy, and produce reports. But the ROI gap almost always lives upstream: in the strategy that wasn’t pointed at revenue, in a measurement framework that doesn’t exist, in the accountability structure that lets marketing report on itself.
You can A/B test your way to a slightly less wasteful version of the wrong work. That’s usually what “marketing optimization” looks like in practice.
How we approach it
The diagnostic establishes a financial baseline
Every channel, every campaign, every dollar tied to a revenue outcome, or flagged honestly as not tied to one. Most clients have never seen this baseline before, and it’s usually the most useful document the business has had about itself in years.
The roadmap targets the specific places where ROI is most movable
Sometimes that’s reallocating spend from a channel that isn’t producing to one that is. Sometimes it’s killing a campaign and not replacing it. Sometimes it’s rebuilding the measurement layer so we can finally see what we couldn’t before. Almost always, it’s a combination of all three.
The monthly rhythm takes over
One number, every month, in dollars. If something’s working, we double down. If it’s not, we kill it. The conversations stop being about activity and start being about return.
One Retainer. Two Stages of Intensity.
What The Engagement Costs
Phase 1
Diagnosis & Strategy
Customer interviews, fieldwork, and a full audit of your funnel, synthesized into a current-state journey map, a prioritized roadmap, and a dollar figure on exactly what’s leaking and where.
Phase 2
Ongoing Retainer
We execute against what Phase 1 found, running your marketing day to day, adjusting as the data updates. As the system matures and runs leaner, the goal is to cost you less, not more.
Questions We Get
How fast can ROI actually improve?
Faster than people expect. The first wins come from killing the spend that wasn’t producing, which often shows up in the first quarter. The bigger wins come from reallocating the saved spend into what’s actually working, and that compounds across the next two to three quarters. Most clients see meaningful ROI improvement within 6–9 months.
What if our marketing is mostly producing brand value, not direct revenue?
Brand work matters, and brand work that isn’t tied to a revenue path is almost always less valuable than its proponents claim. Part of the diagnostic is figuring out where brand investment is actually moving the business and where it’s self-justifying spend. We don’t reflexively kill brand work; we make sure it’s earning its budget the way every other line item has to.