Marketing Investment Intelligence with Len Ward
Season 4 Episode 19: Show Notes.
In today’s episode of The Water Cooler Hangout, we get together with Len Ward to discuss the intricacies of marketing investment and how he helps his clients get an optimal return on investment. We talk with Len about how he departed from a successful career in finance to embark on an entrepreneurial journey, taking on a partnership role with an e-commerce startup in 2004. Len shares how he discovered his passion for marketing and founded the online marketing agency Rank Me SEO. Today he is the CEO and founder of Commexis, a marketing consulting firm that specializes in financial auditing, investment allocation, and reporting digital marketing campaigns. Len founded Commexis through his dedication to marketing investment and upon identifying a need for a company that solves digital marketing ROI challenges. Commexis teaches companies how to optimize their marketing investment in order to improve their return on investment.
Tuning in you’ll hear Len break down his process with new clients and how his company helps to bridge the knowledge gaps within a company, especially between CEOs and CFOs. For all this and much more, join us today as we unpack marketing investment intelligence!
Key Points From This Episode:
- Introducing today’s guest Len Ward, founder, and CEO of Commexis.
- How Len went from studying criminal justice to working in the digital landscape and marketing.
- How Len identified a need for an SEO e-commerce company and started his entrepreneurial journey.
- What first attracted Len to marketing.
- The challenges advertising agencies face in measuring return on investment for many business-to-business service companies, like healthcare or universities.
- Len’s formula for determining return on investment in more complicated companies.
- Vanity metrics and why they are important from a strategy point of view.
- Why smart companies prioritize marketing and sales.
- How companies need to prepare their pipelines for future changes in the economy.
- Why hiring decisions need to be made based on the specific deficiencies of a company’s pipeline or funnel.
- Len breaks down his process for prospective new clients.
- The in-depth conversations that Len needs to have with clients about how their companies are operating.
- When Len needs to help companies reallocate customer acquisition costs.
Tweetables:
“Customer acquisition costs, in my estimation, is the most important allocation metric you need to understand in a marketing campaign.” — @LenWardNJ [0:11:40]
“I think that’s the problem where the gap ends or starts because the marketing person, they don’t understand what the ultimate revenue goal is. They don’t understand what the operating margins are.” — @LenWardNJ [0:14:29]
“One of the biggest things that we point out to clients why their campaign is failing, or they’re not making their ROI is because they have a really self-inflated value of their close rate.” — @LenWardNJ [0:15:51]
“I think one of the biggest deficiencies that are happening right now is the majority of companies aren’t letting marketing help them all the way through the pipeline.” — @LenWardNJ [0:16:46]
“Stop worrying about where you’re ranking on Google, we’re only going to make decisions on revenue goals, and what the final deficiencies are. And from there, we’ll start looking at everything.” — @LenWardNJ [0:21:21]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Len Ward on LinkedIn
Len Ward on Twitter
Commexis
SEO Rank Me Now
HubSpot
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