Redefining ROI: Three Fundamentals That Drive Long-Term B2B Marketing Impact

A recent MarTech article highlights that measuring ROI at the tactical level doesn’t cut it anymore in B2B marketing. It’s essential now for marketers to go beyond clicks and impressions to prove how brand investments deliver long-term financial outcomes. The shift to redefine ROI starts by separating marketing hype from measurable reality.

Digital advertising has been plagued by ad fraud, bots, and shady practices that prevent marketers from effectively measuring campaign performance. TikTok ads reportedly have a 74% fraud rate; Facebook, 57%.

In this environment, MarTech stresses the need to align marketing with broader business goals. But first, marketers need visibility into what’s impacting those goals now and what isn’t. At OMI, where our mission is to deliver real data, real results, and real reach to real people, we focus on these three fundamentals to do just that:

1. Trackability and Measurement
Digital channels, when managed right, offer better tracking than traditional platforms, but not all digital is equal. With the right agency partner, tools, and audience targeting, you can avoid fraud and measure true performance to clearly understand how your campaign is delivering on business goals.

Take Connected TV (CTV) advertising, for example. It allows:

• Conversion tracking: Identify website visitors who made a purchase after ad exposure.
• Footfall attribution: Track viewers who visited a physical location post-ad.

This level of tracking and insight optimizes targeting and leads to higher lead gen and conversion rates.

2. Increased Transparency
Ad fraud inflates metrics and masks real performance. At OMI, we rely on the depth and accuracy of our massive B2B prospect database to ensure that the targets we identify for your campaigns are not only human, but also the right decision-makers for your offers. We eliminate non-human activity from our audiences, so your performance metrics reflect actual engagement—not noise.

Our view is that when metrics aren’t grounded in reality, marketers risk wasting their media budgets. That’s why we believe the ability to create real business impact with marketing starts with clean, honest data and transparent attribution practices

Another one of our most strategic assets in the effort to remove fraud from client campaigns is FouAnalytics, a leader in fighting ad fraud. FouAnalytics President and Founder Dr. Augustine Fou has been on the front lines of digital marketing for nearly three decades, studying and documenting the nexus of cybercrime including ad fraud. Learn more by reading our recent blog or watching the podcast interview

3. Reach and Engage the Right Decision-Makers

We continue to advise our clients that the most essential building block for creating business impact with marketing is taking the time and effort to target the right audiences and decision-makers. That’s our specialty at OMI. Our high-quality prospect data gives clients a way to cut through the hype and focus on who and what matters so that they can reach their long-term financial goals.

Case in point: we recently executed a 2024 email acquisition campaign for a leading telecom provider to promote awareness and sales for two of their solutions. We deployed a three-touch campaign totaling 9 million sends over four months.

Campaign Results:

• Leads Delivered: 872,411
• Sales Attributed: 3,514
• Cost per Lead: $0.295
• 13-point ROI increase over 2022–23 campaigns

Our proven three-touch model, backed by strategic execution and an unrelenting focus on data quality, made the difference.

The telecom client is now poised for continued growth in 2025, with more sales on the horizon. Whether they turn to us for email acquisition, online or programmatic advertising, or full omni-channel campaigns, they now understand that precision audience building is a game changer.

Top Takeaway

Having high-quality data that ensures you’re reaching the right decision-makers—and tracking their engagement all the way to conversion accurately and transparently--is essential to B2B marketing success, both short-term and long-term. Without this critical data driving and informing your marketing and sales efforts, business growth falls short of goals.

That’s why our team begins every client engagement by building a custom audience using our proprietary Living File® B2B database, client data (after deep cleansing it first), or a combination of the two. With 145MM+ verified B2B contacts, our database encompasses 145MM+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above records with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. We also deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace.

One of our most popular add-on capabilities, B2B2C data linkage, weaves together our Living File B2B attributes with B2C attributes for each prospect sourced from 15+ available platforms—including theTradeDesk and leading social channels. This results in a more robust prospect profile that elevates personalization and relevance while enabling us to reach prospects on personal and professional channels for bigger impact and higher ROI. Our audience data can be used on the demand-side platform of your choice for use across media activation, email acquisition marketing, CTV, programmatic, social, and other omni-channel campaigns.

Ready to grow the long-term financial impact of your marketing?
Contact us at request@outwardmedia.com.