How CMOs can boost ROI without sacrificing brand value

CMOs face the hardest squeeze in a generation.

Budgets are flatlining, acquisition costs continue to rise and CEOs demand faster and harder proof that marketing drives revenue. It’s tempting to double down on short-term tactics, but cutting brand investment to boost this quarter’s numbers only mortgages the company’s future by weakening pricing power, eroding trust and shrinking long-term margins.

There’s a better path forward, which treats brand and performance as connected disciplines, not competing priorities. The most effective strategies create momentum in both directions: Demand-generation efforts contribute to brand equity, and a strong brand increases conversion rates over time. Here are eight lessons you can apply to build ROI while strengthening your brand.

Track how brand equity contributes to financial outcomes

Brand equity drives financial efficiency, including additional revenue growth, shareholder value growth and return on investment. CMOs can quantify this impact by connecting existing brand metrics to key performance indicators.

• Choose one or two brand indicators already being tracked, such as aided awareness, consideration or NPS.

• Review their movement over time alongside customer acquisition costs, retention or win rates.

• Look for patterns: for example, “When aided awareness increased 10 points last year, CAC declined by 8%.”

Unify audience data to unlock true customer value

Many organizations struggle with fragmented customer data across multiple systems (newsletters, event platforms, CRM, website analytics), making ROI measurement impossible. AI-powered customer data platforms can unify these touchpoints into comprehensive audience profiles, enabling more precise lifetime value calculations.

• First, audit your data ecosystem, assessing existing data to identify fragmentation and understand where it’s stored and how it overlaps.

• Build a centralized platform by integrating all the various data sources into a centralized place. Forbes recently shared their process of unifying data using BlueConic, highlighting how it began to demonstrate the impact of marketing activities on measurable customer value.

• Activate and optimize across teams. Educate them on leveraging the unified data, demonstrating its value, and continuously refining processes for improved audience engagement.

Build campaigns that serve both short- and long-term goals

Segmenting brand and performance marketing into separate strategies can lead to missed opportunities. Instead, campaigns can be designed to support both outcomes at once, which drives results now while building equity over time.

• Map how brand-led creative primes audiences for retargeting or sales activation.

• Require performance campaigns to report on the brand attributes they reinforce, not just their acquisition metrics.

• Use post-campaign measurement to assess how brand perceptions shift alongside clicks and conversions.

Design tiered metrics for short- and long-term impact

Measurement that’s tied only to last-touch attribution leaves value on the table. Instead, use multi-layered scorecards to tie channel activity to both immediate KPIs and long-term brand health.

• For every major campaign, define a mix of outcomes: direct sales or leads, uplifts in brand strength (e.g., NPS, share of search) and organic channel growth.

• Adopt post-campaign reviews that weigh impact across both horizons, informing next-year budget allocation toward what truly moves customer preference and business value.

Align marketing, sales and finance around unified growth objectives

Brand and performance outcomes are more effective when they’re shared across teams. But alignment shouldn’t mean chasing short-term results at the expense of long-term brand strength. Instead, integration should help marketing protect strategic investments by modeling how brand activity improves revenue efficiency over time, as well as responding to frontline needs without losing sight of broader goals.

• Quarterly alignment sprints: Bring sales and finance into marketing’s quarterly business reviews and annual planning cycles. Model how brand investments will pull forward sales efficiency.

• Feedback loops: Use real-time communications mechanisms to capture what’s helping (or hindering) sales efforts. Use these signals to improve execution and coordination, while staying focused on long-term impact.

Test creative more often, and at greater scale

Creative quality influences both purchase intent and brand favorability. But many teams still test creative infrequently, often due to time or resource constraints. AI can help change that.

• Use generative tools to quickly produce multiple versions of advertising copy, visuals and formats.

• Test these variants with micro audiences to identify high performers before scaling spend.

• Feed real-time performance data back into the creative process to support weekly iteration, not only quarterly reviews.

• Explore tools, including attention mapping and emotional response analysis, to fine-tune creative for resonance and retention.

Take calculated risks, then learn quickly

Taking creative risks can pay dividends in both performance marketing and brand building. Emotionally resonant advertising, often the result of creative risk-taking, can improve short-term sales performance and also longer-term brand equity. But not every creative risk pays off. Treating experimentation like a portfolio—diverse, intentional and measurable—makes it easier to try new directions while managing exposure.

Set aside a defined portion of the budget for creative pilots.

• Give each experiment clear learning objectives.

• Build feedback loops to scale what works and sunset what doesn’t. Then share the insights broadly.

Use AI to adapt faster across the entire campaign lifecycle

When used across budgeting, targeting and forecasting, AI can help teams move faster and adapt to shifting market conditions.

• Use machine learning models to reallocate budget dynamically based on performance trends and changing signals.

• Apply predictive analytics to understand which audiences and offers are most likely to respond, and when.

• Time campaigns more precisely using AI-driven forecasting, aligning spend with moments of peak opportunity.

Build for both this quarter and for the next 5 years

The pressure to prove marketing’s value isn’t going away, but neither is the opportunity to rethink how value is created. The strongest marketing strategies in 2025 don’t chase extremes. They treat every campaign as a chance to build equity and every investment as a signal of intent. With the right systems in place (creative that performs, data that guides and AI that adapts) ROI becomes less of a scoreboard and more of a strategy.

Originally featured in AdAge