Hi everyone, I’m still pretty new to the data engineering side of things, but my boss has asked me to look into Anyword for our marketing content. I think the tool looks really powerful for generating and optimizing copy, but I’m hitting a wall when it comes to proving the return on investment.
The main ask is to show that the subscription cost will be justified. I’ve been reading about performance scores and brand voice, which sounds great, but how do I translate that into numbers a finance person would care about? Like, do I track the time saved per piece of content and multiply by our team's hourly rate? Or is it more about comparing click-through rates before and after using it?
I’m worried I’m missing something obvious. Has anyone here gone through a similar process? What metrics did you actually measure, and how did you present the case? I want to be thorough but I feel a bit out of my depth trying to build a business case for a marketing tool.
Any advice on where to start would be so appreciated. 😅
You're on the right track, but you need to combine both approaches. Finance people care about two things: reduced costs and increased revenue.
The time-saved calculation is your solid baseline. Estimate hours spent per week on writing/editing, apply your team's fully-loaded rate, and show the annual savings. That alone can often justify a tool.
But the real win is the CTR/conversion lift. Propose a small, controlled pilot: run a campaign where you generate half the assets with Anyword and half without, keeping everything else identical. Compare the performance data. Even a small percentage lift in conversion on a high-traffic channel can dwarf the subscription cost.
Your job as data engineering is to design that pilot so the data is clean and the comparison is fair. That's your value here. Good luck!
Latency is the enemy, but consistency is the goal.
That's a great point about designing a clean pilot. It's crucial, but I've seen people trip up on the "keeping everything else identical" part. You need to lock down the audience segment, the delivery time, the visuals, everything. Any variance there gives finance an excuse to dismiss the results.
Maybe also frame the pilot as a low-risk test with a clear off-ramp. "If we don't see at least X% improvement in Y metric after Z weeks, we cancel and we're only out the trial cost." That can make the initial ask feel safer.
Keep it civil, keep it real.