Interim Marketing Director · Buffalo Niagara Partnership · 2025–26
How do you show what marketing earns?
I made organic marketing’s revenue visible to leadership for the first time, and it paid for its own expansion.
$106K+
marketing revenue generated and tracked
+94%
marketing-influenced revenue for our signature event, year over year
+60%
marketing budget growth, fueled by its own revenue
Nothing to measure against
I was brought on to grow marketing at the Buffalo Niagara Partnership. But growth needs a starting point, and there was no record of what marketing earned, which made it hard to justify investing in it. Before anything else, I had to build the organization’s first marketing revenue tracking.
Tracking across disconnected systems
Our ticketing, membership, and email systems didn’t share data, so a sale couldn’t be traced back to the campaign behind it. I designed a tracking process that showed what marketing and sales each contributed, then audited 10+ campaigns across our main revenue programs. Marketing’s share came to more than $106K in revenue.
Each campaign built on the last
With that baseline in place, I ran rolling tests on subject lines, messaging, visuals, and timing. Every new campaign drew on what I learned from those audits, along with reviews of campaigns from earlier years. For one of our signature events, email influenced $27.5K in revenue, up 94% from the year before.
Email-influenced revenue for a signature event, one of several campaigns I improved using past data
$14.2K
YEAR BEFORE
→
$27.5K
MY CAMPAIGNS
Results that grew the budget 60%
I used those results to make the case for increasing marketing investment about 60%, and our VP of Revenue approved it. I directed it to paid ads and video for reach, and to HubSpot and new website tracking for measurement. That gave marketing the infrastructure to keep scaling the channels that bring in members.
STARTING POINT
No baseline
→
No record of what marketing earned
PROOF
$106K+
marketing’s share, traced across 10+ campaigns
INVESTMENT
→
+60%
→
marketing funded its own budget increase to prioritize the channels that bring in members
RESULT
Scaling
Investment enabled scaling through:
-
New web data tracking system
-
HubSpot
-
Video equipment
-
Content vendors