While marketers may believe demonstrating effectiveness will come with an investment ‘reward’, data suggests some are struggling to measure the link.

According to Marketing Week’s 2025 Language of Effectiveness research, in partnership with Kantar and Google, 30% of the total sample have seen budgets increase by 0% to 10% in the past two years following a focus on effectiveness.

The data shows a significant majority of marketers are successfully leveraging a focus on effectiveness to secure budget increases. In fact, a combined 51% of the more than 1,000 brand marketers surveyed reported an increase of some amount. Just a tenth (10.6%) reported a decrease in budgets after focusing on effectiveness.

Though any increase in budget is welcome, it leaves you asking if marketers are being given credit for their effectiveness efforts? Is it a sign of the times or is effectiveness not being rewarded? If they don’t get the reward of additional investment, are marketers dialling back their effectiveness efforts?

Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.

Ross Farquhar, Little Moons

For Michelle Anderson, fractional CMO and current marketing lead at Soul Padel, focusing on effectiveness has never been about chasing bigger budgets.

“You don’t do it to get a budget,” she says. “The value of effectiveness is enabling you to have better, more informed, more educated conversations with the board, your team, with stakeholders. That’s the real reason you do it.”

Having spent much of her career in leisure businesses, Anderson is used to working in an environment where the impact is immediate.

“There’s a ‘bums on seats’ culture – ticket sales, hotel rooms, sport. There’s a direct link between marketing and output. You’ve got to get in step with the way the rest of the business talks. And the business talks about revenue and ticket sales,” she says.

Is a focus on effectiveness delivering bigger marketing budgets?

CMO at CRM software firm Workbooks, Dan Roche, sees the gap between effectiveness and reward as an issue of measurement.

“In B2B the sales cycles are much longer. You can run a campaign and see some leading indicators, but you may not see a return for quite some time,” he states.

“If you’re just measuring impressions or clicks, the rest of the business doesn’t care. What they care about is: is our marketing ultimately getting us more sales?”

In his view, marketers only strengthen their case when they link activity directly to pipeline, opportunities and revenue.

“You need short-term marketing indicators, pipeline and revenue in the medium term, and brand metrics in the long term. That way the business understands what marketing is doing,” he says.

Roche is also curious about which metrics are being used as effectiveness measurements.

“Are they measuring lead volume? Are they measuring conversion from those leads into sales opportunities? Are they measuring that into actual pipeline value, or are they measuring it into revenue?” he asks.

Finding the right blend

For Ross Farquhar, marketing, innovation and sustainability director at mochi ice cream brand Little Moons, effectiveness is its own reward.

“Effectiveness is about asking: is my effectiveness improving in and of itself? That’s a worthwhile cause, regardless of whether it wins you more budget,” he argues.

Farquhar warns, however, that businesses can fall into two equally dangerous extremes.

“I’ve been in organisations that don’t really care about the data and just take wild leaps based on opinion. Sometimes that’s brilliant, sometimes it’s shaky ground. At the other end, I’ve seen businesses where the investment in effectiveness creates an industry in itself,” he explains.

“You spend a disproportionate amount of time and money measuring rather than putting things in front of the consumer. Neither is healthy. Marketers have to find the right blend.”

In his own experience, effectiveness measurement is no substitute for colleagues discussing what the best way forward for marketing spend.

The language has to be: was this meaningful for us, is it something we can measure and what are the results telling us?

Michelle Anderson, fractional CMO

“Even the [organisations] who are most sophisticated around effectiveness don’t close the door on people having opinions and there being debates around what the right thing to do is, ” he explains.

Farquhar’s own rule of thumb is 70% of budget on bets with data behind them and 30% reserved for things that “can’t be measured as rigorously but still count”.

Similarly, while Roche prefers to keep investment within the bounds of what can be measured, he recognises brand building can prove very important, with particular reference to last year’s ‘No BS CRM’ campaign.

“We thought: ‘We’re measuring all of our other activity – which is going OK – but let’s try and make an investment in something different,'” he says.

“[The campaign] actually performed very well in terms of driving better awareness of Workbooks, but also providing some inbound inquiries, and leads that then turned into opportunities and revenue.”

The danger of not finding that balance is highlighted by the research showing 17.3% of marketers aren’t focusing on effectiveness at all, with that figure rising to a quarter (25.3%) of B2B brands and 18.8% of SMEs.

“I don’t know how that’s possible,” says Roche. “If marketers don’t provide metrics, they won’t get the credibility they deserve. And if the business isn’t rewarding them for it, the answer isn’t to stop measuring – it’s to double down.”

Farquhar is more sympathetic, noting the challenge for smaller brands.

“Measurement isn’t cheap. If you’re running on relatively low budgets, you can quickly find it eating up too much. In the early days at Little Moons it was harder to justify,” he states.

Indeed, Farquhar insists “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”, while for Anderson the solution lies in culture.

“The language has to be: was this meaningful for us, is it something we can measure, and what are the results telling us?” she says.

Budget may not be guaranteed, but these marketers agree effectiveness is non-negotiable.