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Whether you’re a CMO, VP of digital marketing, or a marketing analyst, you’re up against the same challenge: How do you maximize marketing’s impact on your business and how do you prove it?
CEOs have woken up to the importance of the marketing function as a potential profit driver. In Boathouse’s fourth annual study on marketing and the chief marketing officer, nearly 60 percent of the 150 CEOs surveyed said they’re specifically looking to their marketing teams to help improve sales and grow market share. And about half listed driving revenue growth as a top priority for their marketers.
They understand marketing should be a key player in creating business revenue by building brand awareness and funneling customers into their pipelines. But they aren’t necessarily confident in their teams’ performances. In that same survey, more than 60 percent rated their marketing departments as average or underperforming.
Marketing executives aren’t blind to this problem. A separate Deloitte survey of CMOs found nearly two-thirds identified proving the value of markeeting to the business was their biggest challenge. The mandate is clear—they need to connect a direct line from their marketing activities to their business impact to justify future investments in their work.
The data dilemma: Why marketing leaders struggle to answer basic questions
Unfortunately, CMOs can’t count on those investments coming in. In 2025, marketing budgets have stagnated, according to a survey of more than 400 CMOs conducted by Gartner, Inc. And about 60 percent of those CEOs say their budgets just aren’t enough to execute their strategies.
As much as they may want to wave up the white flag in this scenario, that’s not how to survive in business. And many are finding new ways to increase productivity, primarily turning to data and analytics to fine-tune their teams’ performances and to AI and other advanced technologies to automate tasks and improve efficiency.
To make their value to the business clear, marketers have to get serious about their marketing data strategy, including collection, storage, analysis, and governance. While it may sound complicated, operating at peak performance in 2025 requires leaders have a data strategy that’s simple but not simplistic. By focusing on the right questions, marketers can predictably optimize their team’s impact and connect it to business results that matter to CEOs.
Are you ready to transform your marketing strategy?
Are you a marketing leader struggling to translate how your activities are moving the business forward? Here are three key questions you must learn to answer to set your department up for success and earn the investments you need to become a top marketing team.
Question 1: How is marketing performing across all channels?
Marketing leaders should proactively keep a pulse on all marketing activities so they can quickly and confidently identify, report on, and capitalize on opportunities across channels. And marketing analysts and ops teams are on the hook for enabling leaders in their department with trusted, real-time, accurate, and actionable data and insights.
Unfortunately, answering this question gets more complicated every day. New marketing channels are consistently popping up, creating an increasingly complex web of customer touchpoints and an overwhelming amount of data. Analysts have to be careful about information overload, making it more and more difficult to uncover important findings.
Why siloed data ruins performance analysis
More data can be a good thing, but only if you’re capable of keeping all that data interactive and useable. Without a single source of truth, marketing analysts and ops teams are forced to keep track of and pull data from many different tools. This can require navigating the time-consuming process of cleaning and prepping data for consumption.
But that’s hardly the only challenge associated with siloed data. Disconnected sources that are difficult to integrate can result in individual marketing teams relying on generic reporting with vanity metrics that only relate to their specific activities, but don’t tell leaders anything about what's actually happening. They can also result in incomplete data sets that throw off marketing performance insights when trying to get a full view of channel and team performance. If your data is incorrect and your analysis is also off, that doesn’t bode well for any business decisions you’re based on this analysis.
How dashboards help leaders act fast
Bringing disconnected data sources together is your first step toward quickly and confidently answering business questions rooted in quality analysis.
Clean, organized, and comprehensive data sets funneled into a marketing analytics dashboard will help you measure marketing performance, track progress, identify anomalies, and turn complex data into simple visuals and reports that are easy to understand.
Moreover, establishing this single source of truth enables you to quickly figure out the ROI of each marketing channel and act on data-driven insights to improve marketing performance across the department.
It’s nearly impossible to connect and contextualize what 15 different reports from separate marketing teams mean to each other. The connections need to be established before you start your analysis. Dashboards make that possible.
Tips from an expert: Align your metrics
Just wrangling your marketing data can be enough to make your head spin. But that’s really just the first step.
Alex Olley, co-founder and chief research officer at Reachdesk, shared his thoughts on how to help marketers explain the value of marketing to business leaders.
His advice is that you have to be prepared to think beyond just the marketing team when trying to communicate value. Sales and finance will inevitably need to be brought in, which means getting aligned on “core metrics, what each metric means, and how you will calculate each one.”
What does success look like?
“You’ve succeeded if your CEO can easily articulate what marketing does at your company, they want to invest more into marketing, and sales are happy because marketing is helping drive revenue,” he writes.
But this might be jumping ahead. So let’s return to this topic later.
Question 2: What specific tactics are working and which aren’t?
Marketing leaders—managers, directors, and VPs—are responsible for optimizing their channels and making sure prospects are progressing through the funnel. To do this, they should know what marketing tactics to deploy and what pipeline results to expect.
Remember, the purpose of measuring how campaigns performed isn’t only to show what worked. Yes, that can be helpful when proving impact. But your CEOs and other top-level executives are constantly looking ahead. So, you want to be able to forecast what kind of impact your proposed marketing strategy will have based on analysis of your previous campaigns.
Why visibility into funnel performance matters
The explosion of marketing channels and tactics you can use to funnel potential customers into your pipeline means you have a lot of different levers to pull when trying to hit your targets. Great marketing teams know which levers to pull and when to pull them for maximum impact on different audience segments.
However, if your data is disorganized, it becomes a lot more difficult to identify the relationships between your levers and consequently which ones to choose for the results you want.
And remember: CMOs aren’t CEOs. The CEO is likely to be more concerned about overall marketing performance. CMOs, on the other hand, are responsible for steering strategy and making decisions about how to best use their limited budgets. They may rely on leaders in their department to provide updates, but many marketing executives also want direct access to the most up-to-date information and analysis related to how different tactics are performing, because ultimately the buck stops with them.
Why real-time optimization beats gut feel
Business conditions can turn on a dime. Changes in the macroeconomic outlook, the introduction of new competitors or products in your market, and even internal changes to how your company operates can result in pivoting your marketing strategy to meet the moment.
Your team won't be able to respond effectively and make real-time decisions if they don’t have accurate data. Planning and organization doesn’t trap you into one way of working; it actually makes you better prepared to handle the challenges thrown at you so a bump in the road doesn’t jeopardize your entire marketing strategy.
Organized dashboards that offer data-driven insights can keep your department both steady and nimble when you have to make fast decisions.
Tips from an expert: Know your metrics in and out
When it comes to strategic decision-making, Olley also says you shouldn’t expect your leaders to be swayed by gut instincts.
“Your relationship with your CEO is way better as a marketing leader if they believe you know your stuff and they’re confident that what you do helps the company succeed,” he writes.
To inspire confidence among your leadership, he says to focus on generating metrics that connect to three key outcomes: efficiency, movement through the marketing pipelines, and revenue.
“If a CEO is saying ‘no’ to your ideas/suggestions, it’s either a terrible idea or you haven’t done a good job at persuading them why you should do it,” he writes.
Question 3: Is marketing making a measurable impact on the business?
Every marketing leader wants to proactively communicate to the C-suite about how marketing is contributing to overall company success in a way that’s backed by trusted data.
But how to prove marketing impact with data is easier said than done.
It’s about more than just perfecting each marketing channel, program, initiative, and tactic; it’s about keeping understanding how the entire marketing program is contributing to achieving your organization’s goals.
The importance of forecasting and pipeline coverage
With limited access to data—or access to stale, inaccurate data from different places—marketing ops and analyst teams can’t present a clear or holistic picture of the overall marketing performance that CMOs are looking for. As a result, marketing leaders also can’t evaluate the success of their program in relation to the rest of the business.
Your CEO doesn’t just want to know how many leads you generated from a campaign. They want to know how that translates into sales and into revenue, which requires more than just getting the marketing team's data in order. It requires identifying the connections between data from different departments so you can connect your marketing strategy to results that have demonstrable value for the executives at the top of your organization.
When the entire team is empowered by data experiences that improve decision-making and performance, marketing leaders can run their part of the business with the confidence they’re doing what they need to in order to achieve the outcomes leaders want.
Why finance alignment is nonnegotiable
So, what data should marketing leaders track? If you aren’t quite sure about what matters most to CEOs, the Boathouse study offers some good guidance. When asked which metrics they want marketing teams to focus on, here's what CEO’s had to say:
- 71% highlighted sales and revenue metrics.
- 65% prioritized customer satisfaction and retention metrics.
- 61% emphasized performance and ROI metrics.
- 56% pointed to market share metrics.
- 53% mentioned profitability metrics.
It shouldn’t be especially surprising that CEOs are most concerned about financial performance. So, a good first step for any marketer is to have a thorough understanding of your organization’s financial goals.
Meet with your finance team to determine what kinds of direct connections you can make to show how marketing activities influence these goals. Generating revenue is a team effort, and they can help you determine which marketing KPIs can accurately showcase your team’s impact.
Zippo: How data storytelling changed the game
Are you skeptical about your ability to draw that direct line from marketing to revenue? The team at Zippo has shown how to do it.
Known for its iconic lighter, Zippo Manufacturing and its subsidiaries also market a large variety of products like outdoor gear and cutlery to customers across the globe.
Before tapping Domo to help organize its data, the company struggled to connect its wide array of data sources from different pockets of the organization. But Domo helped them bring together accurate, up-to-date data they could then use to optimize campaigns and measure their impact.
Plus, they were better able to analyze consumer actions and adapt marketing strategies to keep customers in their funnel.
“We used Domo to identify cart abandonment issues we were seeing through our customer journey flows,” explained Jenna Buhite, digital marketing strategist at Zippo. “We used Domo to create new flows to combat the problem and are now up 32 percent on flow revenue for the year.”
Want a little more evidence? Read about how Cozy Earth also used Domo’s marketing analytics platform to make intelligent decisions about which social channels to prioritize and which products to feature in its digital marketing.
Bonus question: Are we using data to fuel decisions—or just reporting?
While this has already been mentioned, we want to emphasize it again because it’s one of the most important takeaways marketers should absorb: Collecting and reporting data is pointless if it isn’t driving decisions.
Your CEO probably isn't focused on the open rate of an email campaign. They probably don’t pay attention to the pageviews on that new piece of content you posted or the reach of your latest advertising campaign. Why? Because they most likely don’t grasp the significance of all these metrics.
While they might know the literal definitions of all these numbers, they need more context to understand how these metrics matter and how they relate to the bigger picture.
What separates high-performing teams: agility + clarity
Marketing teams that get it right aren’t trying to prove their worth by throwing a bunch of numbers at their CEOs and top-level executives to communicate an inflated level of success. They get it right by orienting their teams and their activities toward the organization's goals and by being able to tell a direct and understandable story about their contributions.
A decision to invest in social media should funnel up to a marketing department goal, which should be informed by the priority outcomes across the organization, which should also funnel up to an organizational goal. That clean line straight to the top of the organization provides a sense of clarity around the purpose of each marketing activity.
As goals and needs shift, this sense of clarity enables you to adapt and adjust strategy swiftly because the purpose of each tactic is expressly defined.
Dashboards aren’t the goal. Action is.
You can do a lot with a dashboard, but a dashboard is still just a tool. It’s how you use the analysis to propel the business forward that will determine your effectiveness as a marketer.
As Domo covered in a separate piece on translating marketing metrics to financial metrics, the purpose of building strong data analysis capabilities is to help run the business efficiently and profitably.
“We sit at the intersection of customer data, business strategy, and revenue impact. If we can’t connect those dots, the business misses opportunities,” writes Actian Chief Marketing Officer Jennifer Jackson in a piece for Forbes.
And when it comes to dashboards, “The C-suite doesn’t need dashboards filled with acronyms,” she explains. “They need a clear, compelling narrative that connects what’s happening in the market to the business outcomes they care about.”
How Domo helps marketing leaders bridge creativity with accountability
The ability to quickly and easily access, understand, and act on trusted data separates effective, modern marketers from the rest. The benefits of a platform that puts data to work for everyone in marketing—from analysts creating easy-to-understand visuals to the VP making investments based on the insights from those visuals to the CMO showing how marketing contributes to company growth—offers meaningful, measurable benefits and ensures marketing’s seat at the leadership table.
With a platform that enables business impact, improves decision-making, and inspires data curiosity, marketing teams can move from casual data observers to effective business owners who make smart decisions that improve outcomes for the entire company. But it’s not just about having access to data; it’s about having access to data experiences that enable marketing to:
- Work with confidence, speed, and agility. Quickly, easily, and confidently answer business questions with access to holistic, relevant, accurate, real-time marketing data.
- Understand what’s working, what isn’t, why, and what to do next. Get insights that make it easy to understand business performance and the best next actions to improve it. Empower everyone to feel ownership of success across the funnel.
- Create a department of impact players. Build a data-driven culture that sparks curiosity, collaboration, and alignment; values data-based decisions; and boosts everyone’s engagement and impact.
- Improve marketing performance and business impact by understanding pipeline contribution, funnel progression, etc. Optimize the entire marketing program and its impact on the business by improving pipeline funnel conversion, campaign effectiveness, CAC (customer acquisition costs), and media mix.
Next steps for marketing leaders
Ready to explore how to elevate the effectiveness of your marketing endeavors. Explore more data-driven marketing resources from Domo and try Domo for Marketing for free.
And if you aren’t quite ready for that leap, keep reading our series on marketing, which examines how the field continues to evolve and how professionals should respond:
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