It’s easy to underestimate what it costs to run your marketing operations. For asset managers, producing content is not an easy task. The materials are data-heavy, constantly changing, and usually go through several rounds of review. Creating a streamlined process is critical to realizing a return on investment. But how do you measure it?

There are three steps to building a solid ROI calculation, and the first step is to understand your true organizational production costs. Very few people know how to really measure this. Most of the time, managers simply look at their departmental head-count (FTE) cost and estimate what percentage of their time goes into updating and distributing content and literature. This broad-brush approach would seem to capture the costs well but often results in a gross underestimation of the true costs.  A full accounting should cover direct labor costs, managerial labor costs, opportunity costs, and error and risk-related costs.

We’ve had two clients undertake a full and detailed Six Sigma cost analysis of their baseline costs and risks associated with manual or semi-automated literature production. The results were staggering.
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