Joonas Hakkarainen
What is marketing value? Ask ten marketers, and you’ll likely get ten different answers. For example, leads, awareness, thought leadership, or pipeline generation. These are all partially true but rarely tell the full story. Marketing value is what you can identify, measure, and affect on through your efforts, both directly and indirectly. A clear understanding of this allows you to communicate marketing’s full impact to stakeholders. Yet, many marketers narrow their view, identifying and communicating only 25–50% of the total value.
In this article, I’ll introduce the concept of direct and indirect value and offer tips to help you broaden your perspective and uncover the full scope of marketing value.
Why indirect value matters?
Marketing value can be broken into two components: direct and indirect value. Direct value is what most marketing teams and leaders can identify without much thought. It's something marketing activities has a direct impact on. It includes typical, measurable outcomes such as leads, awareness, contact requests, or pipeline growth. Most marketers focus heavily here.
Indirect value is too often overlooked but critical for communicating total marketing value. Indirect value includes:
- Process value: How marketing influence business processes, such as sales cycles or hit rates.
- Performance value: Marketing's impact on broader business metrics, such as market share, pricing power, or brand value.
Begin with identifying and quantifying the desired impact
Is marketing’s sole purpose to generate leads? Clearly not. The broader value of marketing often exists but goes unrecognized because it hasn’t been properly identified, quantified, or communicated. The challenge is translating marketing activities into measurable business impact.
To start the journey towards identifying and communicating total marketing value, follow these steps:
01. Identify the key metrics or areas you want to have an impact on.
What processes can you influence through marketing efforts? For example, generating warmer leads might improve a sales team’s hit rate from 20% to 30%. Beyond processes, consider the performance metrics that marketing can impact. How might lead generation indirectly contribute to market share growth or revenue increases?
02. Quantify the impact.
Align with the process or performance metrics your stakeholders prioritize. This is typically an estimate, but don’t shy away from being bold about the potential impact or improvement. Especially when justifying budgets.
This approach requires time, so apply it selectively to high-priority campaigns. Begin with a clear hypothesis, and validate the results once the campaign concludes.
Process value in action
Identifying process value requires understanding of what important processes there are in different functions in the first place. Let's take two examples.
Improving Sales Processes by lead generation: Suppose marketing provides sales with 100 leads. If the hit rate improves from 20% to 30%, those same calls now generate 30 meetings instead of 20. This improvement in call-to-meeting hit rate shortens the prospecting process in the sales cycle and eventually contributes to better revenue outcomes. Additionally, generating good leads and improving hit rate can shorten the total close time, improving the closing process. In this case lead generation improves two distinct processes.
Boosting productivity with a new AI tool: Implementing an AI tool might cut content production time by two weeks, enabling faster campaign launches. The direct value is producing more high-quality content. The indirect value is improving the content or campaign production process, leading to better team productivity and, in the long run, higher profitability.
Having a clear understanding of the processes and performance metrics you aim to influence is critical for building a strong business case for any marketing initiative.
Performance value drives the big metrics — revenue, market share, or pricing power
Although these metrics are often owned outside of marketing, it’s essential to identify and quantify marketing’s contribution.
For instance, marketing might generate leads that result in 30 sales meetings. How many of those progressed to opportunities and ultimately revenue? By analyzing data, you can uncover the correlation between marketing efforts and outcomes like pipeline growth or new customer acquisition. When this alignment is clearly identified, quantified, and communicated, marketing’s role in influencing business performance becomes undeniable.
Encourage a mindset where every team member understands, identifies and communicates the connection between marketing activities and business performance. As accountability grows, so does motivation. Who wouldn’t want to see their work driving real impact?
Learn more
If proving marketing’s total value is a priority for your organization, explore our online course: How to Prove the Total Marketing Value in Complex B2B.
Currently in public beta, this course equips teams with the skills to master value communication through educational videos, real-life examples, and actionable workbooks and templates. It also includes a certification to validate your expertise. Interested in free beta access? Let us know, and we’ll be happy to open it for your team.
In November, we hosted an online event on this topic. Watch the free recording to dive deeper into the discussion here.
