Most businesspeople are familiar with the concept of Return on Investment or ROI for short. The concept is simple: when you invest in a specific task or effort, you want to quantify the benefit of that expenditure in dollars. The problem is that when it comes to an investment in marketing, executives tend to get microscopic, wanting to know that their return was on every ad, every trade show, every mailer, every social media campaign. That is not a useful way to look at marketing, however: when you’re building a house, it’s most helpful to look at the value of the entire structure and property, and not worry about the ROI of a single brick or light fixture.
