Marketing once faced the same credibility challenge now confronting compliance professionals: proving value beyond activity reports. Amy Hanan of LIMELIGHT explores how marketing’s transformation — from measuring vanity metrics to demonstrating revenue impact — offers a playbook for compliance leaders seeking to tie their programs to business outcomes.
For years, compliance leaders have wrestled with the same challenge marketers once faced: How do you prove your program is working?
In the DOJ’s “Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs,” the agency makes it clear that what matters most is effectiveness. Regulators, boards and executives want more than activity reports that show training completions and hotline tallies. They want measurable proof of impact.
And this expectation isn’t unique to the US. The UK’s Serious Fraud Office and the OECD’s “Good Practice” guidance both highlight the same point: It’s not enough to show effort. You need to show results.
This pressure may feel heavy. But here’s the good news: Compliance is not the first function to face it. Marketing has lived this exact transition, and compliance can learn a lot from marketing’s journey.
A lesson from marketing’s journey
Not long ago, marketing had a credibility problem. People saw it as the “arts and crafts” team — making the brand look pretty, running feel-good events, coming up with catchy taglines — with little ability to show return to leadership.
Marketers struggled to answer basic questions from executives: What are we getting for this budget? How does this activity grow the business? When asked for proof, marketers often offered metrics like ad impressions, website visits or email opens, none of which demonstrate bottom-line outcomes.
Over time, marketing adapted. With better tools — marketing technology systems, analytics platforms, attribution models — marketing leaders have built measurability into strategy. They now routinely tie spend and activity to growth, customer lifetime value, retention and revenue. They learned to prove impact.
The results were powerful. Today, marketing leaders are often strategic partners in the boardroom. In fact, McKinsey found that CEOs who place marketing at the core of their growth strategy are twice as likely to have more than 5% annual growth compared with peers.
Compliance is on a similar path.
From cost center to value driver
Just as marketing elevated its role by becoming fluent in business impact, compliance can do the same. And it doesn’t need to take a decade of functional and technological evolution to achieve; everything needed to make this shift is available today, if the right questions are being asked.
Some important questions compliance leaders face today:
- Are employees truly learning from training and applying lessons in real situations, or are they just clicking through?
- Is the hotline trusted and used, or are low calls a sign of underreporting rather than a lack of issues?
- Do policies and controls reduce misconduct or only document it?
These are important questions. But to build value-driver credibility, compliance leaders can go further by linking them directly to business impact:
- Instead of asking only “Are employees learning from training?”… Show how well-trained employees increase speed to market or help win business faster.
- Instead of asking only “Is the hotline trusted?”… Show how trusted speak-up channels surface issues early before they become expensive investigations or public crises.
- Instead of asking only “Do policies reduce misconduct?”… Show how stronger controls lower litigation costs, reduce turnover and protect brand reputation.
This shift in framing — tying compliance metrics to sustainable business outcomes — is the same one marketing went through. It’s what elevated marketing’s voice in the C-suite, and it can do the same for compliance.
What compliance can learn from marketing’s measurement maturity
1. Define clear, outcome-oriented KPIs
Marketers have moved beyond measuring activity inputs (commonly referred to as vanity metrics) like the number of ad impressions, website visits or email opens because they lack actionability and create a false sense of success. Instead, marketers have developed measurements that are outcome-based KPIs: conversion, retention, revenue, growth, customer lifetime value. Compliance can similarly shift:
- Turnover rates in business units with strong compliance cultures vs. weaker ones
- Number of deals accelerated or safeguarded by proactive compliance support
- Revenue at risk due to unresolved compliance concerns (tracked and reduced over time)
- Savings from automation of compliance tasks (policy attestations, monitoring, reporting)
2. Build measurement infrastructure and feedback loops
Marketing invested in data systems that capture behavior over time and correlate it to financial data (e.g., journey analytics, attribution models). Compliance needs similar infrastructure:
- Centralize your data sources (compliance training, HR, audits, hotline, culture surveys) into a single view.
- Employ trend tracking for before-and-after analysis (e.g., number or severity of issues over time, before/after training or control implementation).
- Create a feedback loop where data insights are used to adjust program elements and resource allocation.
- Present compliance metrics data alongside financial and operational data to demonstrate how compliance decisions protect and enable the business.
3. Report in business language; tie outcomes to strategic goals
Marketers learned to speak CFO, CEO and board language: growth rate, margin, customer retention, risk-adjusted return. For compliance, this means positioning metrics in terms like litigation risk, reputational risk, business continuity, deal velocity, employee retention, operational cost savings.
Bonus: Compliance doesn’t have to figure this out alone. The marketing function inside most organizations already went through trial and error. Compliance leaders can partner with marketing leaders to ask:
- How did you build your performance dashboards?
- What attribution models helped you show what was working?
- How did you decide which metrics mattered most to the CEO and board?
- How do you know when your work is driving growth?
These are powerful conversations. Marketing teams can share lessons about data integration, analytics and reporting that compliance can adapt to fit its own needs.
A closing thought
Measuring and sharing impact can feel overwhelming. But it’s also the most powerful opportunity compliance leaders have right now.
Compliance leaders don’t need to become marketers. But they could borrow from what marketing has already proven: measure relentlessly, share transparently, tie outcomes to business value, report them in business terms.
And when compliance demonstrates real impact, it earns more than regulatory approval. It earns trust, support and a stronger voice in shaping the future of the business.
Amy Hanan is chief growth officer at LIMELIGHT, where she helps companies in highly regulated industries accelerate growth and transform marketing strategies through fractional CMO engagements. A senior marketing executive with more than 20 years of experience across legal, GRC, financial services and technology, she previously served as CMO of LRN, leading global marketing transformation, accelerating demand generation and advancing thought leadership in ethics and compliance. 
