Justifying marketing is hard.
Generating awareness and traffic is hard to quantify. What is the ROI for marketing?
The reason is the distance to the sale transaction. How further away how harder it is to quantify.
Conversion is the closest to a sales transaction. They could still cancel, but should be around 100%. If it is not, then you are promising too much.
Then you have show-up’s in a sales call. You can calculate the ratio easily.
Then the number of appointments for a sales call. I little bit further from the sale transaction, calculating is still possible.
Then we have leads, or better, the Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). Now it begins to get fuzzier.
Then we have Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), where we go into muddy sand. How to calculate the ratio to the sales transaction. We can but we need to take a lot of assumptions.
Marketing is so far away from the sale transaction, so the ROI should be taken with a grain of salt.
Marketing is a numbers game. More qualified leads will result in more sales, but how much?
Marketing Automation can help to get the numbers up, without putting more money into it. You can handle higher numbers with the same marketing team or person.