The State of AI in Marketing. Part 1.

 

The intelligence era has arrived.

Explore the latest data from 1,700+ marketers on where AI is helping them outmarket their competitors.

·     Foreword

AI in the loop will help marketers outlearn, outmarket, and outgrow their competitors

As a marketing leader, the most valuable asset your business has today is your raw marketing intelligence. That marketing intelligence lives inside the minds of your employees, in the experiments you run, the data you get back, and the insights you get from customers.

If you’re not thinking ahead, that intelligence will leave with your best employees or, worse still, be outsourced to AI models.

As part of HubSpot's annual "State of AI" studies, we surveyed over 1,700 marketers from individual contributors to CMOs to understand how, why, when, and where they’re using AI in the marketing process. Our recent data shows that there are still massive gaps between those adopting AI at a transformational level, and those still experimenting. And many still don’t even have their data meaningfully connected to their AI tools.

In this report, we’ll break down the data. But we’ll also teach you how you can take action. Plus, you’ll find a customizable plan you can tailor to your brand. We’re here on the journey, too, and sharing results from our experiments as things evolve by the minute.

 

·     Introduction

Most teams are in the AI game, but few are winning it

To get started, we asked marketing respondents using AI to rate their company and department's level of AI adoption on a scale from "Early" to "Transformational."

 

Here’s how we defined each of these stages:

Early

AI use is still taking shape at our company. It is mostly experimental, limited to a small number of tasks or use cases, and outcomes are not yet consistent.

 

Emerging

AI is being used in real workflows at our company and is delivering value, but usage, processes, and outcomes are still evolving.

 

Established

AI is used reliably in repeatable workflows where it delivers consistent value. Teams know where it fits, how it should be used, and what outcomes to expect.

 

Transformational

AI is a foundational part of how the company operates and is materially reshaping workflows, decisions, and business outcomes.

 

In some summaries below, "advanced" AI usage or adoption refers to respondents who mapped their team's AI maturity level as "established" or "transformational."

Most marketing teams are using AI in some way, whether in the emerging, established, or transformational stage of adoption. However, only 10% of the marketers whose teams do use it say they are at the transformational level. There’s room to grow, and many marketing teams are widening their perspective on what AI can do for them.

Though 10% seems small, marketing is the #1 GTM function for advanced AI adoption — with maturity stages far ahead of service and sales professionals. When comparing marketing results to that of 4,000 global sales and service professionals surveyed concurrently, 42% of marketers reported advanced AI use (transformational and established) compared to 23% of service, and 27% of sales professionals.

Marketing is the #1 GTM team for advanced AI adoption.

Marketing teams are also more likely than sales or service teams to say AI is making revenue targets easier to hit. In fact, marketing leads every major AI metric, including: highest advanced AI use, highest active agent use, highest time savings, highest budget growth, strongest reported AI impact on company revenue.

·     Key Findings

How is AI actually changing marketing right now?

1. There’s still room to grow AI acumen

98% of marketing teams are using AI in some way, but only 10% have reached a transformational level.

2. AI helps with speed to market

Speed and agility is the #1 area where AI has improved performance.

3. Teams are employing AI agents

86% of marketing departments now use AI agents, and 76% of those say agent usage increased in the past 6 months.

4. Marketers feel threatened by AI, but it’s linked with career growth

53% of marketers are concerned AI could automate their role. But 1 in 5 transformational adopters credit AI for career trajectory gains.

5. AI skills are expected, but not required

35% of marketers say informal AI expectations already factor into hiring, performance reviews, and compensation.

6. Companies are increasing bets on marketing AI

67% of marketers say their departments have increased AI investments in the past 6-12 months.

Opportunity

AI is working, but are you working it?

AI is helping marketing teams hit their goals, but where it supports most depends heavily on role and level of organization-wide AI adoption. Smaller companies lean on AI for individual output, but enterprise teams use it for communication and strategic impact. Early adopters are able to move faster, but advanced adopters are able to move up in their careers.

Now that AI has moved past the experimental stage, the biggest barriers holding marketing teams back from advancement are related to trust, security, and compliance concerns. This holds steady from 2025, when data privacy concerns were the biggest barrier to adopting new AI tools.

What can AI do for you?

27%

of marketers report speed and agility as AI's #1 performance gain

22%

who are transformational adopters credit AI for career trajectory gains — vs. 5% at early stage

For transformational AI adopters, team communication depth is almost 2x higher than all respondents. Individual contributors see gains in speed, volume, and productivity, while directors report improvements in strategic areas like business impact and team motivation.

“In just a few months, I went from barely using AI to building a personal brand strategy that drove over 3 million impressions on LinkedIn, landing paid partnerships, and consulting with other founders. And, I did it with the help of ChatGPT. What started as a tool to help me brainstorm quickly became a career accelerator. It changed how I work, how I show up, and how I earn.”

Valerie Chapman, Co-founder and CMO of INFRM

AI maturity and goal attainment move together

The further along a company is in its AI journey, the more likely it is to be hitting its marketing targets, and by a much wider margin. 96% of transformational adopters are at or above marketing qualified lead (MQL) targets, compared to 74% at the early stage. Nearly half of transformational adopters (44%) say AI made customer acquisition cost (CAC) goals much easier to hit, versus just 12% at early stage.

There’s a pattern here, but companies further along in their AI maturity may simply have more budget, headcount, and room to experiment — the kind of resources that make it easier to hit targets with or without AI.

The barriers holding AI adoption back

53% of respondents are at least moderately concerned that AI could automate their role, and 40% report that job security concerns have led them to use AI somewhat more. Looking by level of seniority, 48% of manager-level marketers and below use AI somewhat more due to concerns about job security, versus 57% of directors and above.

·     Strategy

Your AI strategy is only as strong as your intelligence layer

Most respondents we've polled across GTM say their companies want to be at an "established" AI maturity level by 2027. But notably, 1 in 5 marketers say their companies are aiming for transformational adoption.

Across regions, companies in Latin America are more likely to anticipate reaching a transformational level of AI, while those in Europe are most likely to have a goal of an established AI strategy.

What’s driving adoption?

60% of respondents say their organizations expect some level of AI proficiency among their employees, but only 15% say meeting a specific AI skill level is a formal requirement.

Even if AI proficiency isn't required, marketers still say these skills are important for role trajectory.

Companies pursuing transformational AI should establish more documented expectations for AI proficiency, provide training, and benchmark performance.

AI is leading to marketing team reorgs

74% of respondents believe they are proficient or fluent at using AI.

Marketing leaders report higher levels of personal AI adoption at an “established” level than managers or below. And they may be more effective in using AI, too.

Recent research found that senior-level professionals are more skilled in using AI because they push back on AI responses, whereas those who are more junior accept AI responses and “let AI think for them,” which erodes their confidence in its outputs. AI isn't making us dumber, but those who engage with it rather than trusting it blindly feel more confident in their AI-assisted work.

Most marketers say their role has changed because of AI, and only 7% say it hasn't changed at all. Even titles are changing, as companies hire or redeploy employees to certain roles.

AI is transforming marketing budgets and hiring decisions

More and more teams are experimenting with AI, and the majority are meaningfully investing in it.

As marketers work against “AI slop,” governance and data become more important, and they're top of mind for many teams, especially mid-market and enterprise teams where there are more cooks in the kitchen.

Companies are documenting AI policies and guidelines, and consistently updating them as new information comes in. In 2025, 18% of organizations had no stated policy on AI usage. In 2026, only 8% either have no AI policies at all or plan to create them. And at most companies, AI has some access to business context, but there are important gaps.

For 1 in 4 teams, data access is excellent — it's accurate, complete, reliable and easy to access. For most teams (53%), it's good. It's mostly reliable, with occasional gaps. And for 1 in 5 teams, data is either fair, with noticeable gaps, inconsistencies, or access issues, or poor, regularly hindering AI use.

https://tinyurl.com/422xfm4a

The Delightful Eight: Best Branding Books to Read

 

Every marketer’s dream is build a strong well-known brand. This is one of the most difficult tasks marketers face during their marketing career. You should never expect to build he brand in a year or two. It takes time and lot of work. And to make this a bit easier it is always good to get some ideas and help by reading the branding books.

Today I want to share with you some really good books dedicated to one of the most difficult and important topics in marketing – branding. I call them the Delightful Eight.

Building Strong Brands

As industries turn increasingly hostile, it is clear that strong brand-building skills are needed to survive and prosper. In David Aaker’s pathbreaking book, Managing Brand Equity, managers discovered the value of a brand as a strategic asset and a company’s primary source of competitive advantage. Now, in this compelling new work, Aaker uses real brand-building cases from Saturn, General Electric, Kodak, Healthy Choice, McDonald’s, and others to demonstrate how strong brands have been created and managed.

A common pitfall of brand strategists is to focus on brand attributes. Aaker shows how to break out of the box by considering emotional and self-expressive benefits and by introducing the brand-as-person, brand-as-organization, and brand-as-symbol perspectives. The twin concepts of brand identity (the brand image that brand strategists aspire to create or maintain) and brand position (that part of the brand identity that is to be actively communicated) play a key role in managing the “out-of-the-box” brand.

A second pitfall is to ignore the fact that individual brands are part of a larger system consisting of many intertwined and overlapping brands and subbrands. Aaker shows how to manage the “brand system” to achieve clarity and synergy, to adapt to a changing environment, and to leverage brand assets into new markets and products.

Aaker also addresses practical management issues, introducing a set of brand equity measures, termed the brand equity ten, to help those who measure and track brand equity across products and markets. He presents and analyzes brand-nurturing organizational forms that are responsive to the challenges of coordinated brands across markets, products, roles, and contexts. Potentially destructive organizational pressures to change a brand’s identity and position are also discussed.

As executives in a wide range of industries seek to prevent their products and services from becoming commodities, they are recommitting themselves to brands as a foundation of business strategy. This new work will be essential reading for the battle-ready.

Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick

Every year, 6 million companies and more than 100,000 products are launched. They all need an awesome name, but many (such as Xobni, Svbtle, and Doostang) look like the results of a drunken Scrabble game. In this entertaining and engaging book, ace naming consultant Alexandra Watkins explains how anyone—even noncreative types—can create memorable and buzz-worthy brand names.

No degree in linguistics required. The heart of the book is Watkins’s proven SMILE and SCRATCH Test—two acronyms for what makes or breaks a name. She also provides up-to-date advice, like how to make sure that Siri spells your name correctly and how to nab an available domain name. And you’ll see dozens of examples—the good, the bad, and the “so bad she gave them an award.” Alexandra Watkins is not afraid to name names.

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

Donald Miller‘s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides listeners with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services. Building a StoryBrand does this by teaching listeners the seven universal story points all humans respond to, the real reason customers make purchases, how to simplify a brand message so people understand it, and how to create the most effective messaging for websites, brochures, and social media.

Whether you are the marketing director of a multibillion-dollar company, the owner of a small business, a politician running for office, or the lead singer of a rock band, Building a StoryBrand will forever transform the way you talk about who you are, what you do, and the unique value you bring to your customers.

Brand Portfolio Strategy: Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy, Leverage, and Clarity

In this long-awaited book from the world’s premier brand expert and author of the seminal work Building Strong Brands, David Aaker shows managers how to construct a brand portfolio strategy that will support a company’s business strategy and create relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity.

Building on case studies of world-class brands such as Dell, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Dove, Intel, CitiGroup, and PowerBar, Aaker demonstrates how powerful, cohesive brand strategies have enabled managers to revitalize brands, support business growth, and create discipline in confused, bloated portfolios of master brands, subbrands, endorser brands, co-brands, and brand extensions.

Aaker offers readers step-by-step advice on what to do when confronting scenarios such as the following:

• Brands are underleveraged
• Business strategy is at risk because of inadequate brand platforms
• Firm’s brands are tired and bland
• Strategy is paralyzed by a lack of priority among the brands
• Brands are cluttered and confusing to both customers and employees
• Firm needs to move into the super-premium or value arenas to create margin or sales volume
• Business faces a relevance threat caused by emerging subcategories
• Margin pressures require points of differentiation

Renowned brand guru Aaker demonstrates that assuring that each brand in the portfolio has a clear role and actively reinforces and supports the other portfolio brands will profoundly affect the firm’s profitability. Brand Portfolio Strategy is required reading not only for brand managers but for all managers with bottom-line responsibility to their shareholders.

Branding with Powerful Stories: The Villains, Victims, and Heroes Model

Whether you are branding your company, your product, your service, or yourself, learn to boost the power of your story and convey a compelling message in any setting by incorporating villains, victims, and heroes.

• Provides a blueprint for constructing a story that will connect narrator and listener through the scientifically proven effect of neural coupling
• Emphasizes the importance of personal authenticity in effective storytelling
• Provides abundant tips on emotional branding, writing, rhetoric, vocalization, pacing, graphics, body language, breathing, and above all, creating drama
• Applies to a broad array of applications and settings, such as job interviews, ad campaigns, and professional presentations

Power Up Your B2b Branding: And Make Your Competitors Hate You in 35 Days

For decades, psychologists have been perpetuating a saying attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” This is total B.S. because every time your competitor (you know the one I’m talking about) launches a new ad campaign or marketing stunt, customers eat it up. Your customers. Bam! Your heart sinks. Your head explodes.

As a marketing professional, you feel you’ve failed your company. I can only guess but I’ll bet your company makes a better product, and your service is far superior, too. (Yup, life isn’t fair.) So you have to decide. Will you hang your head and accept defeat? Or worse yet, make excuses for getting beat up on the marketplace playground? Or, is today the day you decide to take charge of your brand and the trajectory of your growth?If you are a Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Director, Brand Manager, Digital Marketing

Specialist or other influencer of your company’s branding and marketing, I want to make you a promise. In 35 days you will stop introducing yourself as the person responsible for your company’s marketing, and start introducing yourself as the person IN CHARGE of your company’s marketing. Not one, but two editors tried to talk me out of writing this book.

Because much of its content is heavily biased toward creative- and emotion-driven thinking―stuff both editors felt would unfairly challenge marketing directors and turn off corporate decision-makers. I respectfully disagree. It is not a new concept that people buy on emotion (95% of our brains―and therefore our decisions―are powered by emotion) and later validate their purchase decisions withrational thought. So it is imperative to purposefully create, or re-create your branding and marketing based on emotional expression, not just rational thought and data.

I’ve been using creative- and emotion-based stimuli described in this book for over 15 years and found that marketing directors and corporate decision makers “get it” and absolutely hone in on how to identify the things that make their brands unique and powerful. And how to articulate their brands’ purpose and product features and benefits in unique and powerful ways―in traditional, experiential and digital channels.Most of the marketing people I’ve worked with are ingenious, hard-working and proud of their companies. The problem is, most of them (especially those in B2B) underestimate the power of branding and marketing and rely almost entirely on their sales people and reps to introduce products, build relationships and grow their businesses. My mission is to help them power up their branding and marketing so they can shorten the sales cycle, generate more qualified leads, build stronger customer relationships and leapfrog right over their competitors.

Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World

Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World offers authoritative guidance on building new brands, revitalizing existing brands, and managing brand portfolios in the rapidly-evolving modern marketplace. Integrating academic theories with practical experience, this book covers fundamental branding concepts, strategies, and effective implementation techniques as applied to today’s consumer, today’s competition, and the wealth of media at your disposal.

In-depth discussion highlights the field’s ever-increasing connectivity, with practical guidance on brand design and storytelling, social media marketing, branding in the service sector, monitoring brand health, and more.

Authored by faculty at the world’s most respected school of management and marketing, this invaluable resourceincludes expert contributions on the financial value of brands, internal branding, building global brands, and other critical topics that play a central role in real-world branding and marketing scenarios.

Creating a brand—and steering it in the right direction—is a multi-layered process involving extensive research and inter-departmental cooperation. From finding the right brand name and developing a cohesive storyline to designing effective advertising, expanding reach, maintaining momentum, and beyond, Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World arms you with the knowledge and skills to:

• Apply cutting-edge techniques for brand design, brand positioning, market-specific branding, and more
• Adopt successful strategies from development to launch to leveraging
• Build brand-driven organizations and reinforce brand culture both internally and throughout the global marketplace
• Increase brand value and use brand positioning to build a mega-brand

In today’s challenging and complex marketplace, effective branding has become a central component of success. Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World is a dynamic, authoritative resource for practitioners looking to solve branding dilemmas and seize great opportunities.

Branding and Marketing

If you want to discover how to build your brand like Apple and establish brand loyalty on social media for more sales, then you need to read this book.

Did you know:

• The brand worth the most in the entire world is Alphabet—better known as Google, and it`s worth $286 billion.
• It takes 5 to 7 impressions to produce a fragment of brand awareness.
• It takes just 10 seconds for people to form an impression of your brand.

When people see the most popular brands, they form a mental shortcut and associate their brands to the qualities the company’s products and services are known for. For example, when buyers see the Apple logo printed on a smartphone, they’re likely thinking “functional to use” and “reliable” which leads them to buy the product.

Unfortunately, to think that just creating a cool looking logo for their website would immediately translate to sales is not the case; it takes a strategical approach to build a brand that buyers would love and continue coming back to.

Aside from strategic planning, building a brand also means promoting it to where your target audience is. 

If you feel strong about your branding skills I recommend to check this Magnificent Seven marketing books.

Read more, do greater things!

Alexey Cherkasov

https://tinyurl.com/4pcmh8ky

How to Prove Marketing ROI: Strategies, Tools & Metrics

 

By Joe Weller

Proving marketing ROI isn’t just a reporting task — it’s a business imperative. Learn how to set measurable objectives, track meaningful metrics, analyze performance against KPIs, and ultimately optimize marketing efforts to maximize ROI.

What Is Marketing ROI?

Marketing return on investment (ROI) measures the revenue a business gains from its marketing activities (investments) by comparing their cost to the revenue they generate. This helps businesses assess the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.

With 83% of marketing and creative professionals feeling pressure to prove the impact of their work and 94% facing challenges in doing so, demonstrating ROI has become critical in today’s results-driven environment. Aligning marketing tactics to strategic objectives and tracking marketing performance across every stage of the customer journey elevates marketing from merely a support function to a key growth driver in the organization.

For additional strategies, explore these tips to boost marketing ROI. 

How to Calculate Marketing ROI

To calculate marketing ROI, subtract the costs of your marketing activities from the revenue your marketing earned. Divide that number by the cost of your marketing activities, and multiply by 100 to get a percentage that reveals how much return was generated for every dollar spent.

For example, a home cleaning service that invests $8,000 in a digital ad campaign gains 160 new bookings from that campaign. Each booking is worth $75, which means the campaign generated $12,000 in revenue. The ROI would be:

(12,000 – 8,000)

——————       x 100  =  50%

  8,000

This indicates that for every $1 spent, the campaign returned $1.50.

While positive ROI is a good indicator of effectiveness, benchmarks play a key role in providing additional context. These can include historical data or industry standards, which help teams make more informed and data-driven decisions about their budgets and strategies to fuel sustainable growth and profitability.

Pressure to Prove Marketing ROI

Many factors make proving the impact of marketing and creative work challenging, including shifts in strategic plans, limited internal resourcing, lack of access to centralized data, and disjointed workflows between teams. Proving the impact, or ROI, of marketing has always been daunting, and the pressure is mounting. In 2024, 60% of marketing professionals reported an increase in the demand to demonstrate the business impact of their work. According to Smartsheet’s 2025 Pulse of Marketing report, this sense of urgency is compounded by the fact that 78% feel they have to prove their value more than other departments, and only 51% believe their team is viewed as a strategic partner within their organization.

The report found that leveraging technology can help overcome these challenges — more than half of the marketing professionals surveyed felt they did not have access to the tools required to demonstrate impact, while 87% believed they could use their time more effectively with the right tools. The key to proving marketing ROI starts with taking a strategic, data-driven approach to marketing.

How to Prove Marketing ROI With a Project Management Tool

To link marketing and creative work to business impact with a more strategic, data-driven approach to marketing strategy,  teams need the right tools. Project management tools offer marketing teams more than just task tracking — they provide the foundation and framework for proving marketing ROI.

Sixty-four percent of marketing and creative professionals believe their organizations would benefit from project management tools more than other types of tools — including AI tools. In addition to streamlining workflows and improving team alignment, project management tools unlock three keys to proving marketing ROI: visibility, standardized processes, and centralized reporting.

• Visibility: With greater visibility, teams and stakeholders gain a real-time view of project status, resource allocation, and deadlines, making it easier to stay on track and aligned with strategic goals.
• Standardized Processes: Standardized processes help eliminate inefficiencies by ensuring that every campaign follows a consistent path — and eports on metrics that connect to strategic KPIs. This makes performance easier to measure and replicate.
• Centralized Reporting: About 37% of marketers and creatives cited lack of access to centralized data as their main challenge to demonstrating marketing ROI. Centralized reporting turns scattered data into a single source of truth, unifying the team’s efforts and direction. Real-time integrations ensure metrics are updated automatically and accurately, providing a clear view of performance. This capability enables timely optimizations and frees up your team to focus on more strategic initiatives.
   

When used effectively, a project management tool creates the structure and insight necessary to tie every task, campaign, and creative asset back to the bottom line.

Enhance team collaboration, manage campaigns, and track deliverables more effectively with this guide to marketing project management.

Getting the Right Tool to Visualize Marketing ROI

To effectively visualize marketing ROI using a project management tool, you’ll need three core capabilities: real-time visibility, ease of use, and a balance of structure and flexibility.

Here are the factors to help you find the right tool to visualize marketing ROI:

• Balance: A project management tool that helps you visualize marketing ROI should have the right balance of standardization and flexibility; it should be structured enough to ensure consistent processes and still be able to adapt to evolving strategies and needs.
• Real-Time Visibility: Real-time visibility allows you to sync across tasks, timelines, and performance metrics to keep everyone aligned with a centralized source of truth.
• Ease of Use: If the tool is too complex, teams won’t utilize it and you’ll be stuck in the status quo. A user-friendly tool should have integrations, custom reporting, and intuitive interfaces.

AI marketing reporting tools are increasingly used to monitor campaign success in real time, but understanding the fundamentals of campaign measurement is essential for setting benchmarks and KPIs that AI systems can analyze effectively.

How to Link Marketing Work to Business Impact and Prove Marketing ROI

To link marketing work to business impact and prove marketing ROI, marketing teams should ensure tactical alignment with strategic goals and engage in full-funnel tracking — tracking a lead from awareness to conversion.

A common misconception about proving marketing ROI is that you have to tie every activity directly to conversions or sales. But focusing only on final outcomes ignores the entire story. By aligning marketing tactics to measurable metrics across the entire funnel, teams gain the context they need to understand and improve results at every stage.

• Tactical Alignment to Strategic Goals: Organize projects around clear KPIs early on in the development of a marketing strategy to better prioritize work and demonstrate value. This makes it easier to measure and prove marketing ROI. Use your project management tool to track metrics across KPIs, such as the following:
  • Awareness (impressions, branded search volume, share of voice)
  • Engagement (click-through rate, scroll depth, social shares)
  • Brand perception (survey data, sentiment, Net Promoter Score)

• Strategic Alignment and Performance Mapping: To unlock full visibility into marketing ROI, Smartsheet allows teams to map every asset or tactic to strategic objectives, key performance metrics, and campaign-level tracking. Whether you’re driving awareness, increasing engagement, or converting leads, you can align every task to measurable goals and monitor progress. In Smartsheet, this is a combination of hierarchy structure, cross-sheet linking, customer metadata columns, and reporting.

Working with a top-down approach, marketing teams start with sheet hierarchy — from strategic objective to campaign to marketing tactic or asset. Then, using custom columns for strategic tags, you can capture and categorize data, from strategic objectives to KPIs, campaign names, owners, channel, target audience, status, and priority. 

Formulas allow you to make cross-sheet references, pulling data from one sheet to another to view the big picture. Using this feature, marketing teams can link performance data to tactics and assets (such as paid social ads, webinars, or emails), and create reports and dashboards to show how these contribute to campaigns, strategic objectives, and overall performance.  

A marketing team could leverage this capability to develop a strategic campaign tracker — each row represents an asset or tactic, and includes important information such as which campaign it’s part of, what strategic objective it supports, the target metric for each (such as views or clicks), and actual performance. 

Then the team can create a summary sheet with cross-sheet formulas to summarize campaign-level metrics and compare them to benchmarks. From there, the team creates a dashboard to help analyze the assets and tactics: what percentage aligns with strategic objectives and how well each is performing. This helps identify gaps in strategic coverage and unlock a wealth of other insights from which to make more effective and impactful campaign decisions.

• Automated Reporting: Marketing teams can save time while maintaining consistency with automated reporting. Use templates to streamline recurring reports, and customize reporting views to match each stakeholder’s needs — whether they’re high-level KPIs or channel-specific metrics. Built-in automation ensures that reports update in real time, so teams don’t waste their time chasing down data.

A marketing team could save hours of manual work by using Smartsheet to generate a campaign performance report that consolidates data from multiple campaign sheets. The team can leverage custom filters to view data only from the current week and to send alerts when performance isn’t in line with KPIs. You can also set the report to be automatically shared with relevant stakeholders every Monday. 

In addition to saving hours of manual work, automated reporting ensures leadership consistently sees the same, accurate, up-to-date metrics, building trust and dependability between leadership and the marketing team. Automated reporting also supports data-driven conversations and decision-making, and it makes meetings more productive.

• Centralized Planning for Cross-Functional Collaboration: With Smartsheet, you can ensure all teams are working from the same playbook. With integrations across popular marketing and analytics tools, such as Salesforce or HubSpot (via Data Shuttle), Smartsheet becomes the connective tissue that links strategy, execution, and results — enabling marketing teams to deliver real-time insights and confidently demonstrate business impact.

A marketing team might use Smartsheet to run coordinated product launches with product, sales enablement, and customer success teams. A shared launch tracker sheet could be used to support both cross-functional collaboration and centralized planning. Team members could use the launch tracker to assign tasks and track deadlines and dependencies. The launch tracker sheet also allows alerts and reminders to keep stakeholders on track, comments and attachments to eliminate long email threads, and a dashboard that summarizes progress.

The launch tracker sheet helps teams avoid missteps, ensures on-time delivery, and most importantly, ties launch success back to marketing efforts by linking to metrics such as webinar attendance, PR pickups, and demo requests.

• Strategic Alignment and Performance Mapping: To unlock full visibility into marketing ROI, Smartsheet allows teams to map every asset or tactic to strategic objectives, key performance metrics, and campaign-level tracking. Whether you’re driving awareness, increasing engagement, or converting leads, you can align every task to measurable goals and monitor progress. In Smartsheet, this is a combination of hierarchy structure, cross-sheet linking, customer metadata columns, and reporting.

Working with a top-down approach, marketing teams start with sheet hierarchy — from strategic objective to campaign to marketing tactic or asset. Then, using custom columns for strategic tags, you can capture and categorize data, from strategic objectives to KPIs, campaign names, owners, channel, target audience, status, and priority. 

Formulas allow you to make cross-sheet references, pulling data from one sheet to another to view the big picture. Using this feature, marketing teams can link performance data to tactics and assets (such as paid social ads, webinars, or emails), and create reports and dashboards to show how these contribute to campaigns, strategic objectives, and overall performance.  

A marketing team could leverage this capability to develop a strategic campaign tracker — each row represents an asset or tactic, and includes important information such as which campaign it’s part of, what strategic objective it supports, the target metric for each (such as views or clicks), and actual performance. 

Then the team can create a summary sheet with cross-sheet formulas to summarize campaign-level metrics and compare them to benchmarks. From there, the team creates a dashboard to help analyze the assets and tactics: what percentage aligns with strategic objectives and how well each is performing. This helps identify gaps in strategic coverage and unlock a wealth of other insights from which to make more effective and impactful campaign decisions.

https://tinyurl.com/33ehsdm2

To prove Marketing ROI (Return on Investment), you need to directly connect marketing expenditures to the company's financial results. Business leaders and CFOs do not care about abstract "likes" or "clicks"—they want to see real revenue and profit.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to measure and prove marketing ROI.

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1. The Core ROI Formula

The simplest way to calculate ROI is by using the standard financial formula:

Note: CFOs often prefer using Gross Profit instead of total revenue to account for the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). In this case, the formula becomes: (Profit - Marketing Expenses) / Marketing Expenses.

2. Key Metrics to Prove ROI

To present a complete picture, you need supporting metrics. These can be grouped into two logical blocks:

Financial Metrics (The Language of Business)

• LTV (Lifetime Value): The total revenue a single customer generates for your business over their entire relationship.
• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): The cost to acquire one new customer. Calculated as: Total Marketing Expenses / Number of New Customers.
• LTV : CAC Ratio: The ideal ratio for a growing business is 3:1 (the customer brings in 3 times more than it costs to acquire them). A 1:1 ratio means marketing is losing money; a 5:1 ratio means you are underinvesting and missing growth opportunities.

Conversion Metrics (The Connecting Link)

• CR (Conversion Rate): The percentage of users who take a desired action (e.g., converting from a website visitor to a lead, or a lead to a buyer).
• CPL (Cost Per Lead): How many leads you generated and the average cost of each.

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3. Setting Up Closed-Loop Analytics

You cannot prove ROI if you do not know where your buyers come from. You need closed-loop analytics to tie marketing directly to sales:

• System Integration: Connect your web analytics (like Google Analytics 4) with your CRM system (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.).
• UTM Parameters: Mark every single link in your advertising campaigns.
• Call and Offline Tracking: Use call tracking software and unique promo codes to link phone calls or physical store visits back to specific digital ads.

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4. Attribution Models

Customers rarely see an ad once and buy immediately. Usually, the path is longer: they see a social media post → read an article → click a search ad → buy.

To prove the value of each channel, choose the right attribution model:

• Last Click: All credit goes to the final channel that led to the purchase. (Simple, but not always objective).
• First Click: All credit goes to the channel that first introduced the user to the brand.
• Linear: Credit is split equally among all touchpoints.
• Data-Driven: Algorithms analyze user paths to evaluate the actual impact of each channel. This is the most accurate method.

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5. How to Present ROI to Leadership

When defending your marketing budget to the CEO or CFO, follow these three rules:

1. Speak the language of money: Lead your presentation with revenue, gross profit, and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Leave top-of-funnel metrics like "reach" or "followers" for internal marketing team meetings.
2. Show historical trends: Compare current ROI with previous quarters or against your initial forecasts.
3. Separate Brand vs. Performance: Be transparent about separating performance marketing (easy to track and calculate ROI quickly) from brand marketing (PR, awareness), which has a delayed effect. For brand marketing, use metrics like Share of Voice (SOV) or growth in organic branded search traffic.