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Marketing earns influence when it speaks the language of growth.
This article is part of Empowering Marketers Through Measurement, a six-part B&T series for marketing leaders and their teams who want to make more confident decisions, strengthen their commercial influence and play a greater role in driving growth. Analytic Partners is a global leader in Commercial Analytics, helping organisations turn data into expertise and understand what drives performance. We created this series to share that expertise and help marketers use measurement as a practical source of confidence, credibility and action.
Better measurement can help marketers turn campaigns, customer activity and brand investment into the language the rest of the C-suite understands: growth.
Marketers have become exceptionally good at measuring marketing
We can report how many people saw an advertisement, clicked on it, watched it, searched for the brand afterwards or completed a purchase. We have dashboards that update by the hour and a vocabulary rich in impressions, engagement rates and return on ad spend. The difficulty begins when those measures reach the rest of the business.
A CFO does not usually want to build next year’s investment plan around click-through rates. A CEO wants to understand what marketing contributed to revenue, profit, customer acquisition, market share and the future value of the business.
Marketing’s influence therefore depends increasingly on its ability to connect what it does with the commercial outcomes the organisation is trying to achieve. Better measurement gives marketers the evidence to make that connection.
Marketing makes a meaningful contribution but it is only one driver of growth
Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome measures the effectiveness of more than a trillion dollars in marketing activity across over 1,000 brands globally. It shows that marketing typically drives between 5% and 15% of business outcomes in APAC, depending on the company, category and market.
The range demonstrates the scale of marketing’s contribution. It also means that between 85% and 95% of business performance is driven by factors beyond marketing. Yet when sales soften, marketing is often asked to explain the entire result.
An individual leadership team therefore needs to answer two connected questions: What is our marketing contributing, and what else is influencing growth?
Answering those questions requires measurement that separates the incremental contribution of marketing from everything else affecting the business. Sales can obviously rise because advertising worked. They can also rise because distribution expanded, prices changed, a competitor stumbled, the weather improved or underlying demand was already growing.
A credible commercial measurement programme accounts for these wider demand drivers and the way they interact with marketing. This avoids assigning marketing credit or blame for every movement in performance. The result may be more conservative than the number shown in a channel dashboard but it gives the wider business a more complete and credible basis for making decisions.
First, agree what success means
One common source of friction between marketing and finance is that both functions can use the term ‘ROI’ while calculating different things.
Marketing teams often use an incremental marketing ROI that compares the sales or revenue caused by marketing with direct marketing costs, such as media, creative, production and agency fees.
Finance may use a fully loaded ROI that also considers indirect costs, overhead, staffing, cost of goods sold and the opportunity cost of capital.
A fully loaded ROI helps finance assess profitability, inform financial planning and support external reporting. Neither approach is inherently superior. What matters is that the numerator, cost base, time horizon and intended decision are clearly defined. Confusion arises when those definitions and assumptions remain implicit, allowing marketing and finance to use the same term while meaning different things.
A useful first step is to establish a shared measurement vocabulary with finance: define the outcome being measured, agree which costs are included and over what time horizon, and be clear about which version of ROI guides tactical optimisation versus strategic investment. Analytic Partners recommends aligning on common ROI definitions and, where relevant, Net Present Value, calculated transparently and applied consistently.
Measure the business, not just the media
Commercial Analytics connects marketing with the other controllable and uncontrollable factors affecting performance, then quantifies their contribution to outcomes such as sales, profit, acquisition or market share.
Analytic Partners recommends connecting measurement directly to agreed business goals, capturing the wider range of business drivers and producing sufficiently granular outputs to tell organisations both what they should do and when the impact is expected.
This changes the conversation. The discussion moves beyond which channel appeared to deliver the strongest return in isolation. The marketer can explain how much incremental revenue marketing generated, which activities drove it, what it cost and what a change in investment is likely to mean for the business.
Credibility creates influence
This is about more than defending next quarter’s budget.
Investors and analysts are asking for greater transparency around return on investment, customer acquisition costs and lifetime value. At the same time, CMOs are being expected to report on metrics once considered the domain of finance, including incremental revenue by source and ROI across the full marketing mix.
Marketers who can do that gain credibility. That credibility earns them a stronger voice in wider decisions about growth, investment and risk.
A marketer who can show how customer demand, pricing, brand, media, distribution and external conditions interact is equipped to contribute to business strategy, not only advertising strategy.
Measurement is therefore more than proof of what marketing has done. Used well, it helps marketers influence what the business does next.
Four ways to start speaking the language of business
You do not need to turn every marketer into a financial analyst. A practical starting point is to:
Decide what growth, return and success mean before activity begins.
Separate what marketing genuinely caused from what would probably have happened anyway.
Speaking the language of business means translating the language of marketing into terms that colleagues across the organisation can use.
The marketer who can talk confidently about audiences, creativity and brand, then connect those things credibly to revenue, profit and growth, becomes considerably harder to leave out of the next important business conversation.
Want to build a stronger commercial case for marketing?
Download Analytic Partners’ United in Growth: Transforming Shareholder Value Through CFO-CMO Collaboration to learn how marketing and finance can align around measurement, investment and sustainable growth.
