Business Growth Strategies For CEOs: Top CMOs On Marketing Strategy Implementations

Outsider Insights | You Can't Measure AI ROI If You Can't Measure Marketing ROI

Tue, Apr 28, 2026 | Posted by Dawn Werry

Executive Takeaways

Most mid-market companies lack the measurement foundation to evaluate AI — or any marketing investment.
Hours saved, speed to market, and revenue realized are the three key AI ROI markers — baseline required.
AI amplifies what's working. If measurement is broken, AI won't fix it.
Real results start with a defined problem and a way to measure it — not the tool.

Outsider Insights

Across Chief Outsiders, we talk to hundreds of CEOs every month. In this series, we explore the trends and challenges we’re hearing from these discussions – and what you can do if you’re facing the same issues in your business.

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The Digital Growth Imperative for Small- and Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs)

Thu, Apr 19, 2018 — There are many ways to think about growth, and many models to help stimulate your thinking. One of the more traditional, best known, and still effective models, is this one:

SEO for the CEO: What You Need to Know, How Not to Screw It Up

Sun, Jul 28, 2013 — Maybe it’s happened to you: your board looks at your budget for web marketing and asks about key performance indicators. As the CFO or CEO, you boldly look over the data from your marketing team and condense the complexity to a quick test: How are we doing on these five keywords? One of your board members measures the effectiveness by doing web searches: Are we ranked in the top 3 on Google for this one? And as the wind shifts, Marketing starts to focus on a few keywords, looking at rankings instead of results. Meanwhile, the OTHER 500 search terms that are driving traffic go under the radar, and the bounce rate (one page visits) doesn’t budge. While one search term can look like the prize because it has high volume, it doesn’t necessarily convert into new business. And more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more sales. Top rankings don’t matter if they’re the wrong search terms.

Marketing Budget: How much should a CEO spend?

Wed, Jul 17, 2013 — How much sould a CEO spend on a marketing budget? Whether or not it is the first question asked, it is usually one of the first questions a CEO thinks about when discussing his or her marketing efforts: how much should I spend on a marketing budget? Well, the average company spent 10.4% of its revenue on marketing in 2012. And according to Gartner, that marketing budget is scheduled to go up by 6% in 2013. Now this includes salaries of the marketing people, but it doesn’t include things like software licenses or servers for the data. And this spend widely varies for the types of companies from IT at 3.5% to over 12% for media companies.

The Four Basic Pillars of Digital Economics

Sat, Feb 16, 2013 — For many companies in both the B2C and B2B markets, selling online is a must. Whether selling digital goods like downloadable software, SaaS-model subscription offerings or actual physical goods, in my experience there are a few straight forward and basic economic pillars of selling online that are often overlooked. While your products, pricing and promotions are important, I’ve seen that a renewed focus on the intersection of these four pillars delivers significant increases in sales. These pillars are: • Traffic • Close rate • Average order value (AOV) • Retention

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Growth Insights for CEOs