How to Justify Investment Cost in a Digital Marketing Contract

Whether you are the CEO, CMO, or you are an internal marketing manager, justifying the cost of your marketing investment is a mandatory step that must be taken before the handshake and initial signing. And really, price matters. But more importantly, justifying the investment cost and understanding projected ROIs matters more. 

When was the last time you cracked open Google to research a product or service before making a purchase? If you are like most people, probably within the last six months, right?

Maybe you bought a new home theatre system for the family and hired a contractor to add the theatre room to your existing blueprint. Or you might have been tasked with the job of finding a digital marketing agency for your company.  

At some point in researching these topics, you likely looked at the cost and asked yourself if it would justify the potential value of your investment. 

This article is intended to help organizational leadership learn how to justify the value of Google-partner digital marketing agencies with the goal of educating decision-makers along their journey for finding an ideal solution to improving their bottom line through year-over-year growth. 

The Approach

The approach is everything when it comes to getting ideal results. Most digital marketing agencies have a singular specialty and offer other strategies that are performed in a very traditional, ordinary manner using techniques that are 10 years old. 

The first thing you will want to ask yourself is this: what does the approach brings to the table that’s new, or that rivals a traditional offering?

For example, digital marketing agencies offering growth marketing stacks are a great place to start sifting through the many options out there looking for the right approach to help grow your business. 

Why? Because growth marketing agencies offer multiple approaches, and each one is customized to meet the needs of individual organizations. This means you only pay for the services that will actually provide a return on your investment, and not some “sloppily put together package” that bundles services you don’t need (like your cable TV provider giving you channels you will never watch). 

So What is a Growth Marketing Stack, and How does it Justify Cost? 

A growth marketing stack is a customized selection of tech tools and strategies that run together to help organizations achieve the same goals. The multi-channel approach often uses SEO, paid media, social media marketing, and inbound marketing that feeds into a robust CRM where marketing and sales align to facilitate growth. Its entire foundation is built around your customers, how they make purchasing decisions, your sales cycle, and your growth goals. 

Growth marketing stacks always justify the investment because internal marketing managers have direct access to the CRM to see which channels are profitable, and which ones aren’t. This allows revenue to be redirected to more profitable channels. 

In addition, growth marketing stacks help sales and marketing talk to one another–something that is almost unheard of in traditional business practices. When marketing and sales teams are able to share data and align strategies at every portion of the funnel, operations are able to reach the right people, at the right time, and naturally, conversions will go up. 

Does the Digital Marketing Offering Provide Internal Solutions?

Another way to justify the cost is to see how the marketing contract impacts your internal efforts. We already talked about how growth marketing stacks align sales and marketing, so let’s return to this topic and really tap into the value.

According to HubSpot, more than 80 percent of sales teams waste time trying to organize leads, following up with lost causes, and letting qualified leads slip through the cracks. When companies invest in growth marketing solutions they get the right tech tools that automate the entire lead scoring and follow-up process based on stages, buyer personas and a number of other criteria that can be easily customized. This process not only eliminates human error, but also helps teams be more efficient in how they spend their time.

CRMs and marketing automation tools also help organizations save thousands on internal costs. A growth marketing approach can reduce an internal team of 15 people down to two or three people. Considering that salaries for these roles range from 48K to 120K (based on role and position), a solution like this one can already save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars right out of the game. Now, two or three people can work directly with your digital marketing agency to track performance, make ongoing changes to an agile strategy, and ensure a steady revenue stream through a manageable approach that’s simplistic and straightforward. 

Full Transparency, No Smoke and Mirrors

The problem with traditional digital marketing is that Google Analytics is opaque: you can get high-level data that sheds light on how people generally view your website, but there are no in-depth details that reveal anything about their needs, or the solutions they expect to find. 

Growth marketing stacks offer full transparency on leads. You are able to see their names, email addresses, job titles, and even the company they work for. A growth marketing approach also reveals where people convert from, as well as the detailed journey they took to get to your website, and convert. All of this information helps marketers optimize content, revamp web designs, and make a number of other critical changes to enable maximum growth. 

There are Many More Ways Growth Marketing Stacks Justify Investment Cost: Learn it All Right Here

We just touched the tip of the iceberg. Learn how growth marketing approaches capture valuable data about your target buyers that can be used to optimize marketing and sales strategies, while also increasing direct conversions. In addition, growth marketing stacks shorten the sales cycle by automating repetitive tasks, using data and tech to define and set manageable goals, and by improving the user experience (among other things).  

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