With all the talk of an impending recession, marketers will have to be better than ever at proving the return on investment they can provide. As sales start to decline, marketing budgets are always among the first to be cut.

With the increase of digital marketing, tracking ROI is becoming increasingly easier. Yet a study completed recently by the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) and reported by a recent article on BtoB Online found a vast majority of small businesses do not track ROI on lead generation programs. That brings me to the question—How do these marketers know if their programs are working? Without solid metrics to help justify the worth of your programs, your programs and future ones like them may be hard to validate. As budgets contract, these metrics may be your saving grace.

As marketers continue planning for 2008, marketing analytics should be a solid part of their program. This year, maybe more so than in the past several years, positive metrics that show the value of a program or program elements will help marketers keep their traction as their CEO or CFO are looking to cut their budgets.

As you implement your tactics, make sure you are thinking about how you will track the effectiveness of each of your tactics. What is your call-to-action? How will you know if someone responded to your call-to-action? How will you compile these metrics for presentation?

If you are not thinking about these things, you'd better move ROI and analytics higher up on your priority list. If the predictions are right and we do head into a recession, you will need those metrics to justify your budget and your marketing campaigns that thrive on those budgets.