ROMI That Makes Sense - By Rodrigo B. Ferreira

Last summer I developed a project as part of my MBA internship in a B2B Marketing environment. One of my project’s outcomes was an effective method to measure the impact of Marketing in large corporations through a more logical and constant measurement of ROMI (or Marketing ROI), which can be defined as the optimization of marketing spend in support of the brand strategy by building a market model using valid, objective Marketing metrics.


My research and the direction form my supervisor (an Integrated Marketing manager) led me to create an innovative approach to measuring ROMI which, to me, was a very successful achievement in the Analytical Marketing field. The idea behind this new approach is a quantitative method that enables a company to quantify monetarily the worth of their Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and to structure the calculation of the return on investment of a given Marketing budget in a given period of time. This, in turn, enables marketers in large organizations to demonstrate clearly and consistently the value of Marketing for the rest of the business.


The idea was born from the association of two concepts: The definition of ROI and the ideas of how to measure Marketing effectiveness from the book “Digital Body Language” by Steven Woods. Using MQLs as the main indicator of the Marketing contribution for a company’s profit I was able to build a spreadsheet that calculates the percent return for every invested dollar in Marketing. Being a mathematician I was happy to find my way through so many ratios, formulas, equations, averages, maximizations, etc.
Although detailed and somewhat complex, I believe that my model is a helpful way to measure the improvement of the Marketing effectiveness over time and it was really enjoyable to work on Analytics, Metrics, Lead Generation and B2B Marketing during this project!
The work could only be finished thanks to the collaboration from professionals in different areas from whom I needed to extract information. I talked to people working in Finance, Sales Operations, Sales, Channel Marketing and Agencies. I am grateful for their contribution and inputs.