Marketing must deliver a return. We can all agree on that. If you’re pouring budget into campaigns, assets, or channels, you should see results. Marketing isn’t about vanity metrics or feel good branding without purpose. But here’s the real issue, the way we measure and think about B2B Marketing ROI is deeply flawed.
In B2B marketing, the obsession with quick wins, short term ROI, and instant gratification has taken over how we plan, execute, and evaluate our activity. And why wouldn’t it? When the CFO, CEO, and board are demanding the return on every pound spent, it’s easy to try to draw a straight line between marketing spend and revenue – as if every campaign were a vending machine where you put in £1 and get £2 (or even £20) out.
But let’s be honest – that’s not how B2B marketing works. The sales cycles are longer, the buying journeys are complex, and decision makers rarely make choices based on a single well placed ad. They need nurturing, relationship building, and trust. Yet, the relentless demand for quick fix metrics like “What’s the marketing ROI this quarter?” leads to poor strategies, snap decisions, and an over reliance on tactics that undermine long term brand growth.
ROI isn’t the enemy; it’s essential. But when you focus only on short term returns, you overlook the bigger and more complex picture – how sustainable value is created over time in B2B marketing.
Tactics Over Strategy & the Illusion of Progress
B2B marketing is particularly vulnerable to this short term obsession. The sales process is long, the buying journey is winding, and multiple stakeholders are involved in making decisions. But when ROI is measured in the short term, it forces marketers to favour tactics that deliver instant results over those that build sustainable, long term growth.
Instant Win Mentality
Think of short term ROI as that shiny, tempting piece of chocolate sitting on the table. It’s easy to grab, provides a quick hit of energy, and satisfies the immediate craving. But long term ROI is more like a well-balanced meal – it takes time to prepare, it’s harder to measure the benefits, but in the end, it nourishes you and provides lasting value.
When we focus on short term ROI, we start relying on fast moving tactics like PPC ads, one-off email campaigns, or trend-hopping content that might give you a short lived spike in leads. Sure, it looks great in the weekly report, and it might even boost your next quarterly review. But over time, you realise these tactics don’t add up to a sustainable strategy. They don’t build loyalty, deepen customer relationships, or set your business up for long term success. But soon, audiences get fatigued, channels become saturated, and results hit the “ROI plateau.”
Illusion of Progress
There’s a reason why you often see fantastic results at the start of a campaign and then… nothing. The initial push, whether it’s a new social media ad or a high energy webinar, can indeed drive a surge in traffic or leads. But like any thrill, the excitement wears off. Audiences become fatigued, channels become saturated, and before you know it, you hit the B2B Marketing “ROI plateau.”
The success metrics flatline, and marketers scramble to replicate that initial boost, only to find that each effort produces diminishing returns. This creates a dangerous cycle: quick ROI spikes are celebrated, then efforts shift to the next shiny tactic to keep up the momentum. It’s an endless loop of chasing the latest hack or trend while the real value – long term brand and customer relationships – goes ignored.
The Roots of Short Term ROI Obsession
To understand how we’ve ended up in this B2B marketing ROI obsessed situation, it’s essential to recognise a few underlying reasons. In our modern world we’ve become over reliant on data and a failure to appreciate the complexities of human behaviour and decision making. Our obsession with short term ROI stems from a mix of cultural, organisational, and psychological factors that have fundamentally changed how we perceive marketing’s role.
Tyranny of Data and “Rational” Decision Making
We’re living in an age where data, in face everything must be measurable, trackable, and – ideally – tied to a neat little graph. Data, on the surface, is great – it allows us to make informed decisions and optimise our focus, and showcase results. But there’s a downside: our over-reliance on data creates a false sense of certainty. Marketing, with all its nuances and messy, human interactions, is forced to fit into tidy models that show clear causality.
The problem is marketing is not a fixed formula. It’s a blend of art and science, involving emotions, perceptions, and behaviour – things that resist measurement, especially in the short term. By trying to measure every interaction, touchpoint, and campaign down to the last penny, we’re pretending that it is. And when it comes to B2B Marketing ROI, this desire for rational, quantifiable results means that short term data becomes king. If we can measure the outcome of a campaign in clicks, leads, or MQLs, we feel in control.
It’s comfortable. But, we’ve devalued anything that can’t be tracked, quantified, and easily reduced to a number on a dashboard.
The Quarterly Results Pressure Cooker
It’s not just marketing that’s obsessed with short term thinking – it’s the whole corporate world. The pressure to deliver results every quarter drives businesses to focus on immediate gains at the expense of long term strategy. Boards, shareholders, and C-level executives are constantly searching for quick wins, revenue boosts, and the comfort of upward-trending metrics.
Marketing, ends up caught in this pressure cooker. ROI is the go-to metric because it’s perceived as an easy way to justify spending. “Show me the return, and show it to me now,” says your CFO and CEO. So, marketers scramble to prove ROI over short days, weeks, months, or quarters, aligning with the organisation’s thirst for immediate, tangible results.
And in doing so, they neglect the nature of B2B marketing, where value is built gradually and every interaction compounds over time. This kind of short term thinking not only leads to poor decision making but also an inherent mistrust of anything that doesn’t show a direct, immediate result. We’ve traded the concept of “value creation” for “value demonstration” – where the primary goal is to justify marketing’s existence, rather than invest in activities that will create lasting customer relationships and drive future revenue.
The Accountability Trap
Marketers face huge pressure to show that every pound is put to good use. In a world where every penny is scrutinised, the last thing any marketer wants to hear is that they’ve wasted the budget. The fear of wasted spend pushes marketers into an accountability trap, where everything must have a clear, direct, and immediate payoff.
This mindset effectively rules out activities that build trust, brand visibility, or customer loyalty – activities that don’t produce instant results but deliver significant ROI over time. These are complex, long term plays that transform brand perception and influence buyer behaviour – but they’re invisible to short term ROI metrics. Consequently, marketers feel pressured to stick to initiatives that deliver quickly at the expense of, more impactful strategies.
The Mess of Attribution
The next big issue; attribution. In marketing, the idea that you can measure it , you can understand and control it has led to a fixation to map every action to an outcome – every ad to a sale, every click to revenue – as if the B2B buying journey were a straight line.
But that’s not how B2B buying works. The journey is more like a labyrinth than a straight line, with multiple stakeholders, touch points, and moments of influence. Attempting to isolate the exact ROI of each element is like trying to count every grain of sand on a beach. The reality is far more complex and interwoven than our data tools allow us to see.
Think about how a typical B2B buyer behaves. They might see an ad on LinkedIn, attend your webinar six months ago, download an ebook, engage with your sales team, then finally books a demo after seeing an ad on LinkedIn. Now try to input all of that into an ROI model and isolate the value of each touchpoint. Was it the LinkedIn ad that clinched it? The webinar? The sales call? All of them together? Impossible, right? Yet, the pressure to prove short term ROI means we tend to over credit the last click point – the one interaction that nudges the buyer over the line – and miss the complex series of engagements that actually value created by the full customer journey.
However, our industry’s fixation on attribution means that marketers feel compelled to justify every touch point with ROI numbers. If you can’t measure it, it must not be important – or so the logic goes. But in reality, some of the most valuable parts of marketing – like perception, word of mouth, or even just the “feeling” someone has about your company – are impossible to measure in a spreadsheet. When we lose sight of that, we end up optimising for things we CAN count, not for things THAT count.
Digital Delusion
The rise of digital marketing has only amplified the short term ROI problem. Digital channels have provided unprecedented tools to track and measure interactions, creating an illusion of control and precision marketers in previous generations could only dream of. Digital has trained us to value what we can see – clicks, impressions, MQLs – and devalue the ambiguous, harder-to-measure components of marketing like sentiment, emotional impact, or word-of-mouth advocacy. The result? A bias toward channels and tactics that deliver measurable results quickly. Think PPC, email marketing, retargeting – all fantastic tactics, but often used to satisfy the thirst for short term ROI. Meanwhile, channels that build long term value – like content marketing, organic social engagement, search engine optimisation and community building – are often neglected because their results are less immediate and harder to track.
This creates an “efficiency trap,” where the most trackable activities are mistaken for the most valuable ones. Marketing becomes ends up less about influencing behaviour and perception and more about optimising for whatever metric is happens to be most visible on a dashboard.
Long Term Thinking in a Short Term World
To overcome this obsession with short term ROI, we need a fundamental shift in perspective. B2B marketing is more like growing a garden than running a factory – growth needs to be nurtured over time. It requires patience, creativity, and a willingness to invest in elements of marketing that won’t instantly fit into a data driven box.
Marketers must also educate stakeholders – from CEOs to CFOs to boards – about the nature of B2B marketing and how long term brand value is built. The conversation needs to shift from “What’s the ROI this month?” to “How are we building trust, authority, and relationships that will pay dividends over time?”
The challenge is bravery. Marketers need to invest in areas that are hard to measure, knowing that while the return may not be instant, the long term payoff is invaluable. By focusing on creating true value – not just what’s easy to measure – marketers can drive sustainable, meaningful growth that transcends short term demands.
My goal here isn’t to abandon ROI but to apply different thinking. Shift to a long term view that reflects the sum of all your marketing efforts, not just the ones you can measure on a daily, weekly, or quarterly basis. Only then can we move away from the tyranny of short term ROI and start playing the long game – the one where real success is found.
Sustainable Marketing = Long Term Thinking
So, how do we break free? How do we rethink ROI in a way that drives actual business growth and sustainable success, rather than just looking good on paper?
Brand Building as an Investment
A strong brand is one of the greatest assets a business can have, yet it’s often under appreciated in ROI discussions.Since brand building doesn’t offer immediate returns that are easily quantifiable, many B2B companies dismiss brand-building as fluff or a “nice-to-have.” But let’s be real – every time a buyer sees your content, engages with your company, or uses your product, they’re forming perceptions that drive their buying decisions.
Building a brand is a long term investment. It requires time, effort, and budget to develop trust, recognition, and loyalty. While it’s not easy to measure in the short term, the long term returns – increased sales, customer loyalty, and market differentiation – are enormous.
Relationships + Trust = Value
If you’re focused solely on short term returns, you’re missing the most critical part of B2B marketing – relationships. B2B buyers are making decisions on behalf of their companies, which means they need to trust you before they buy from you. Trust doesn’t happen overnight. It’s built through multiple touch points, engagements, and positive experiences with your brand. And if you’re not willing to invest in those relationships, you’re going to struggle to deliver sustainable ROI.
Instead of pursuing immediate wins, look at how to build deeper connections with your audience. Offer value beyond just your product. Educate them, entertain them, and be there for the moments that matter most. These efforts will drive those sustainable growth and ROI – not just the short-lived gains from one-off campaigns.
Shifting from Campaign ROI to Lifetime Value
Finally, it’s time to stop viewing ROI as a campaign-by-campaign metric and start considering it in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). In B2B, where the value of a customer compounds exponentially over time, short term ROI is a limited and often misleading metric. By focusing on CLV, you shift your thinking from “How can I make drive metrics from this campaign?” to “How can I create value for this customer throughout their journey?” And that’s where real returns lie.
Beyond Clicks & Leads. Measuring What Matters
Short term ROI leads marketers to focus on metrics that are easy to measure – impressions, clicks, and lead volume – which may not truly reflect progress or growth. If you’re measuring only what happens during demand creation, you’re missing the bigger picture of how value is created across the entire customer lifecycle.
So, what should you be measuring instead?
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
One of the most important metrics is CLV, which focuses on the total value a customer brings throughout their relationship with your business. By tracking CLV, you can better understand the ROI of marketing activities that contribute to long term customer growth and loyalty, not just immediate sales. This encourages investment in initiatives like content marketing, nurturing, and brand building that might not deliver instant results but drive sustainable customer value over time.
Influence Over Pipeline and Revenue
Measuring the influence that marketing has on the sales pipeline provides a fuller view of how marketing activities contribute to revenue generation. Instead of focusing just on lead conversion, this metric looks at how marketing efforts help progress prospects through demand creation and demand capture, support sales conversations, and ultimately influence closed deals. The emphasis shifts from traditional top of funnel metrics to how marketing impacts prospects across all stages of their journey.
Consider metrics such as:
- Pipeline Contribution: How many opportunities were created or influenced by marketing?
- Influenced Revenue: What percentage of your won deals had some form of marketing touchpoint?
- Average Deal Size Growth: Has the involvement of marketing increased the value of deals?
Pipeline Velocity
Pipeline velocity measures how quickly leads move through demand creation and demand capture and turn into closed deals. By analysing how fast prospects progress from one stage to the next, you gain a deeper understanding of how marketing supports a more efficient sales process. A higher velocity indicates that prospects are more engaged and that the alignment between sales and marketing is strong. It’s a key metric for identifying friction points and opportunities to improve conversion speed and efficiency.
Pipeline velocity can be influenced by:
- Educating through high value content, case studies, and webinars to speed up decision making.
- Ensuring the right messaging is provided at every stage, reducing time spent on unnecessary questions and objections.
Engagement Metrics for Content and Brand Awareness
While lead generation is important, building awareness and engagement over time is critical to sustainable growth. Instead of only looking at top-of-demand creation actions, consider engagement metrics that reflect genuine interest and interaction, such as:
- Content Consumption: Time spent on site, video watch rates, content downloads, and repeated engagement with your materials.
- Brand Interaction: Social shares, comments, and mentions that reflect brand perception and market influence.
Tracking these metrics can help you understand what resonates with your audience and how your brand’s narrative is being received over time.
Customer Journey Mapping and Touchpoint Analysis
Understanding the entirety of the customer journey is key to long term value creation. Rather than looking at individual campaigns, map out all touch points that prospects encounter on their path to becoming a customer. This holistic view enables you to measure how each touchpoint contributes to the overall customer experience and conversion process.
Consider analysing:
- Multi-Touch Attribution: Understand how different touchpoints interact to influence buying decisions.
- Engagement Across Stages: Assess how each piece of content, email, or ad contributes to moving prospects from demand creation to decision-making.
- Drop Off Points: Identify where prospects are losing interest and optimise those areas for a more seamless journey.
Retention and Expansion Metrics
While lead generation gets most of the attention, retention and expansion are crucial for long term growth. By focusing on metrics related to customer success and expansion, you can better understand how your marketing efforts are contributing to lasting value beyond the initial sale. Important metrics include:
- Customer Retention Rate: How well are you keeping your customers over time?
- Upsell/Cross-Sell Rate: Are your marketing efforts helping to expand accounts by cross-selling additional services or products?
These metrics shift the focus from the immediate transaction to the overall lifetime value of your customer base.
Finding the Balance: Short & Long Term Strategy
While the focus of this article is on long term value, short term tactics aren’t the enemy. In fact, they can play an important role when balanced properly within a larger strategy. The key is to use short term tactics as stepping stones toward a more sustainable marketing effort.
Use Short Term Tactics to Fund and Fuel Long Term Initiatives
Short term campaigns like Paid Search ads, email marketing, or social promotions can deliver a quick boost in leads and revenue. Use these campaigns to generate immediate results that help support and fund longer term brand building. Think of short term tactics as a way to build momentum and provide breathing room while your larger strategy takes shape.
Allocate Budget Wisely
Instead of focusing all your budget on either short term or long term efforts, allocate a percentage to each based on your company’s goals and growth stage. A good rule of thumb is to use 60-70% of your budget for long term efforts that drive brand awareness, customer loyalty, and thought leadership. The remaining 30-40% can then be invested in short term tactics that generate quick wins and complement your longer term goals.
Create an Integrated Marketing Plan
Your marketing should not be fragmented into “short term” and “long term” activities. Instead, all campaigns should support your overall business objectives. For instance, a short term webinar campaign to generate leads can be aligned with a long term content strategy that nurtures these leads into customers over time. A consistent message, voice, and content across all campaigns will ensure your marketing efforts work cohesively to drive sustained value.
Sell the Value of Long Term Marketing Internally
Securing buy-in for long term marketing investment isn’t just about presenting the numbers. It’s about changing the mindset of leadership, who are often drawn to the appeal of short term wins and immediate ROI. They want to see results fast, and it’s your job to show them why playing the long game will pay off – not just in leads, but in sustainable growth and revenue. This is not about sidelining the quick wins; it’s about reframing what success looks like for the business over time.
Show How Long Term Marketing Sets Up Future Wins
Marketing doesn’t just exist to fill the pipeline with leads who are ready to buy today. Think of marketing as an engine that builds a long term presence, one that makes your brand familiar, trusted, and top of mind when your prospects are ready to buy – even if that moment isn’t this quarter. The leadership team may be inclined to ask: “What’s marketing doing for us right now?” But instead, shift the focus: “What is marketing doing to ensure our brand is where it needs to be in six, twelve, or eighteen months?”
By showing up consistently, your brand becomes a recognisable fixture in the market. When a prospect sees your brand regularly – in their LinkedIn feed, in articles they read, on the webinars they attend – you’re embedding yourself in their mind. They may not be in buying mode YET, but when they are, your brand will be the one they already know and trust.
“Would it be valuable that if every time our target audience is online, they see our brand?”
This is the crux of demand creation. It’s not about waiting for the moment of need; it’s about making sure you’re already there when the need arises.
Align Marketing and Sales for Long Term Gains
One of the most compelling arguments for long term marketing investment is the synergy it creates with sales. Sales wants leads that are ready to buy now, but the reality of B2B is that big deals often take time – they need nurturing, relationship building, and touch points that happen over months, sometimes even years. If marketing is focused only on short term demand capture, you’re missing the chance to build relationships early and nurture high-value accounts over time.
“Should sales and marketing teams be focused on the same target marketing list?”
Long term marketing isn’t about casting a wide net; it’s about precision. It’s making sure that sales and marketing are aligned on the same high value target market. That way, marketing is consistently warming up the right accounts, building familiarity, and feeding sales with leads that are already aware and engaged.
When marketing is building brand awareness and relationships over time, sales teams aren’t starting conversations cold – they’re starting them warm, speaking to prospects who know who you are, what you do, and why they should care.
Explain the Value of Engaging Prospects Before They’re Ready to Buy
A common misconception is that marketing’s job is done once a lead becomes a sales opportunity. But let’s think about the buyer journey in real terms. Not every prospect is going to make a buying decision today, or even next quarter. The reality is, some of the best future customers for your business are in research mode, looking to learn more but not ready to engage sales right now. If you only focus on those ready to buy today, you’re neglecting the huge potential of nurturing long term opportunities.
“How valuable is it for our sales team to speak with prospects who are a perfect fit for us, even if they won’t buy right away?”
Think of it as playing the long game. The sales team may want the quick win, but planting seeds with future buyers is what allows you to harvest big deals down the road. By maintaining regular touchpoints through content, insights, and targeted campaigns, you stay on the radar of high-value prospects, so when they’re ready to buy, you’re already at the top of their consideration list.
Reinforce the Need for Multiple Touch Points
B2B buying decisions aren’t made on the back of one interaction. They’re made after a series of touchpoints: reading content, attending webinars, engaging on social media, and speaking with a sales rep. If leadership is only looking at what happens at the bottom of the funnel – or worse, the last touchpoint before a deal closes – they’re missing the bigger picture. Every touchpoint matters, and long term marketing investment is about being present across all of them.
“How many times do you think a prospect needs to see our brand before we become memorable to them?”
Brand recall is built over time, not in one shot. It’s repeated exposure that creates familiarity, which in turn leads to trust. This means showing up over and over again, in ways that add value to the prospect, to make sure that your brand is not just seen, but remembered.
Emphasise the Importance of Starting the Sales Conversation Warm
When sales reaches out to a prospect, there’s a huge difference between starting the conversation from scratch and engaging with someone who already knows who you are. A cold outreach can be met with suspicion or apathy. But when a prospect already knows your brand, has seen your content, and understands your value, they come to the conversation informed and interested.
“When we start a sales conversation, would it be valuable if the prospects already had a sense of who we are and what we do?”
Long term marketing investment ensures that your brand is actively shaping the conversation before it even reaches the sales stage. By doing the groundwork to build brand awareness and trust, you’re not only speeding up sales cycles but making them more efficient.
Position Your Brand as the Go-To Choice When the Time Is Right
In the end, long term marketing investment is about positioning. When prospects are ready to buy, you don’t want them Googling “best solution for X” and landing on your competitors. You want them to instinctively think of your brand as the go-to option because you’ve already built that awareness and trust. And that doesn’t happen overnight – it’s the product of consistent, long term effort.
“When our prospects are in buying mode, don’t we want to be the first company they think of?”
If you can get leadership to say “yes” to that, then you’ve already started to shift the conversation from a transactional view of marketing to one that sees it as a strategic, long term driver of growth.
Shifting the Mindset for Sustainable Success
Selling the idea of long term marketing investment internally is about changing the narrative. It requires you to connect marketing activities today to the future opportunities they create. By framing the conversation around the bigger picture – consistent visibility, stronger brand recall, and nurturing the right prospects over time – you encourage your leadership team to move beyond short term wins and understand the value of sustained, strategic marketing efforts.
It’s about getting buy-in not for a single campaign, but for a mindset shift: from transactional, campaign-based thinking to a long term approach that builds relationships, increases trust, and positions your brand as the natural choice when the time is right. When you ask the right questions, frame marketing as an integral part of the customer journey, and show how it sets up sales for success, you make it clear that long term marketing investment isn’t just about “spending money.” It’s about setting your business up for growth that lasts.
When leadership sees marketing not just as a cost to manage but as a strategic asset that can drive the future of the business, that’s when you know the conversation has shifted – and the real value of long term marketing can start to shine through.
Embracing the Long Term Marketing Mindset
The obsession with short term ROI is holding B2B marketing back from reaching its full potential. The metrics that drive immediate gratification are often those that hinder true growth – pushing marketers to favour quick fix tactics over strategies that build sustainable value. To break free from the cycle of short term wins, it’s crucial to shift the perspective from isolated campaigns to a long term approach that delivers lasting impact.
Long term marketing is an investment in visibility, relationships, and brand authority – a compounding effect that doesn’t fit neatly into quarterly spreadsheets but drives real, tangible business results. It’s about nurturing prospects before they know they need you, making sure your brand is the familiar name in their minds when they’re ready to buy, and creating a foundation where sales conversations are warm, trust-filled, and efficient.
When you shift the narrative internally, aligning your team on the value of brand building, customer engagement, and lifetime customer value, you’re not just buying more time for marketing. You’re creating a cultural shift that recognises marketing as a driver of sustainable business growth. It’s about connecting today’s efforts to tomorrow’s revenue – and building a marketing machine that fuels your business not just for this quarter, but for the long run.
In the end, the real ROI isn’t about fast wins or instant returns; it’s about building a brand that stands the test of time, fostering customer loyalty, and driving a continuous pipeline of high-value opportunities. It’s time to stop playing for the next report and start playing for the future – because that’s where the real value lies, and that’s where the real returns are found.
So, let’s stop asking “What can marketing do for me now?” and start asking, “What can marketing do to drive the business forward, month after month, year after year?” That’s the long game – and it’s a game worth playing.
