Media effectiveness: How CMOs get CFOs to see marketing as a value driver

Lorraine Landon

What’s beyond your marketing campaign’s reach, click-throughs, or video views? It’s figuring out whether these metrics lead to tangible business results.

CMOs often find it difficult to effectively articulate to the finance team if a campaign has contributed to meeting business goals. This may be due to the complexity of the consumer journey, the various elements that make up a marketing campaign, or the fact that not many CMOs are talking to their finance team in the language of value.

In sub-Saharan Africa, we’ve seen an increased communication disconnect between CMOs and CFOs, with marketing often being labeled as a cost centre to decision-makers.

With 50% of all ad spending in South Africa projected to go through digital channels by 2029, it becomes more important for marketers to move towards effectiveness in order to optimise budgets and to show their value.

In 2025, CMOs have some work to do — starting with understanding measurement, aligning with their CFOs, and reformulating their marketing strategy to a goal-based framework.

Part 1: Adopt a modern measurement framework

Marketers are vital business drivers. A solid strategy is supported by a modern measurement framework: incrementality, attribution, and marketing mix modelling (MMM).

Incrementality is how marketers find out how much a specific marketing effort actually increases sales. It's like trying to figure out if a new billboard actually caused more people to buy your product, or if those sales would have happened anyway. You can do this using incrementality testing such as Campaign Experiments, Conversion Lift, or Search Lift.

Imagine you're trying to figure out which of your ads convinced someone to buy something from your website. Attribution is like detective work to figure out exactly which ad or online interaction led to that sale. Trace the steps a customer took along the marketing funnel and assign value to a specific action by setting up attribution models, such as data-driven attribution, in Google Ads.

MMM involves using a number of data sources to understand the relationship between marketing efforts and business goals. Google has recently developed its own MMM solution which will soon be available to marketers.

The modern measurement framework:

Part 2: Speak the language of value

As your modern measurement framework is taking shape, this shift in approach will allow marketing to bridge common terminology and understanding with the finance team on how marketing should be understood and approached.

CMOs in sub-Saharan Africa can re-align with their finance team by:

1. Aligning the business goal to all marketing activities. Figure out how each part of your marketing plan, like which platforms you use or what kind of ads you run, will help you achieve that goal.

2. Being clear what return-on-investment (ROI) looks like at each stage of your marketing funnel. Explain that brand awareness may not lead to immediate lead generation, but that brand favourability distinguishes you from your competitors. It also helps to move the consumer closer to taking an action, such as booking a test drive, signing up for a subscription, or buying a concert ticket.

3. Being clear on the consumer journey. Know your product or service’s consumer journey so that media channels and budget decisions can be justified.

4. Monitoring campaign activity. Relay marketing choices, throughout the campaign, back to the CFO that delivers toward the original business goal.

5. Capturing goals and targets at the outset for accountability and benchmarking. This marks marketing activity and goals in stone so that all departments can track decisions made, adjustments and budget allocation.
   

Part 3: Reframe your marketing strategy for effectiveness

Measuring the effectiveness of marketing is how CMOs are able to prove it as a vital revenue driver. However, only 41% of marketing leaders currently believe their company is mature in marketing performance measurement which may explain why they’re struggling to connect marketing activity to business value.

A top-down strategy that translates a business goal into marketing communications is the general plan. How might that look?

You may start first with your company’s overarching business objective and select specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that are in harmony with meeting this objective. After setting your KPIs, create your campaigns across the digital spectrum, such as Search, YouTube, and social media.

Within each channel, you might build a specific audience that both caters to the users of that channel and optimises your campaign. For example, using your predetermined knowledge of each platform’s audience and how they operate such as users of YouTube versus Search.

And, lastly: be clear on the messaging and the ROI metric for each platform and channel so that value can be explained.

Here is this goal-based framework visualised:

Part 4: Measurement is possible with performance tracking tools in Google Ads

Measurement is only as good as the data that feeds it and consented first-party data is the key to an informed, well-performing campaign.
Tools to improve your conversion tracking right now:

• Track conversions, such as website purchases, form submissions, or event registration, using Google Ads Conversion Tags, Floodlight Tags and Google Analytics Key Events. These tools not only track the conversion, but also other details about the customer, such as the path to purchase, location, if they are a new or returning customer, or if the conversion met a value-based goal.

• Add offline conversion tracking to include the data from conversion events that can be harder to track otherwise, for example in-store purchases, interactions with call centres, or events on the way to a conversion such as moving through the sale process for car insurance.

Why measurement is a necessity for marketers in sub-Saharan Africa in 2025

The industry’s current climate feels like shifting tectonic plates: marketing budgets are shrinking, customer interactions across marketing channels are increasing and changing, and consumer behaviour is ever-evolving.

CMOs in sub-Saharan Africa have an opportunity to rebrand themselves as business critical in the eyes of the C-suite with a renewed ability to prove that marketing is aligned with business goals.

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