Marketing Effectiveness Programs: Top 10 Things To Avoid
Marketing Management Analytics COO Ed See and Chief Client Officer John Nardone led a session that was fundamentally about how to maximize your overall marketing expenditures and drive your bottom line. Analytics. Processes. Numbers. Go ahead, skip to the next post, or scroll to the bottom of this one for a takeaway factoid. I gotta give them credit, though, for doing their level best to make all of this palatable to the walkin’ around marketing folk, most of whom are not heavy into data and research.
So, without further ado, here’s the bottom line promised by the session title (my apologies for the post length, but hey—the session promises a Top 10, you deserve the goods!):
1. Thinking that ROMI (return on marketing investment) measurement is the goal Measurement is not the goal, measurement is a tool for managing the overall process and, more importantly, driving continuous performance improvement.
2. Treating marketing accountability as a tech/tool project It’s fine for your IT dept. to house the data, but they shouldn’t own the data.
3. Believing your organization is ready to be accountable Marketing accountability needs organizational readiness; take an internal audit to see what skills, processes, tools, and data exist, then see where the needs are.
4. Believing better visibility requires more reports So, don’t just report data, build a company-wide analytics framework.
5. The more precise the measures, the better the decisions Information is there to inform decisions, not lead them.
At this point, I’m thinking that this is session makes a very strong case for any mid- to large-size company without a strong CMO to go out and hire one yesterday. Alrighty, intermission over, here are the other five:
6. Treating marketing effectiveness as a marketing function Marketing effectiveness is not a marketing issue, it’s a company issue. Remember: We’re talking about systemic change here.
7. Cobbling the effort without dedicated resources Again, this is about new metrics and new procsses; you need someone to champion and drive the effort forward, preferably at the executive level.
8. Dropping analytics and tools on the desktop New metrics and processes need to be phased in so that change can take root.
9. Leaving the data until last Keep marketing analytics in mind early in the process, so that as your information architecture is designed from the ground up, you know what data you need to capture—and why—so that you can make meaningful analyses.
10. Taking the “do it yourself” approach Well, it can be done, but you better have expertise in seven major competencies: project management, business metrics design, organization and process design, data and database design, marketing analytics, systems integration, and change management.
Is all of this agita and tsuris worth it? Ed and John say definitely: They’ve typically seen a 15% improvement in ROI for every marketing dollar spent in just the first year of implementation alone.
And if your mind isn’t totally glazed over just reading this session summary and you’ve maanged to make it this far, here’s a takeaway tidbit for you that speaks to how badly most companies address research and metrics: A recent MMA/Forrester/ANA study showed that only 78% of organizations surveyed were not satisfied with their ability to get organization agreement on a definition of marketing ROI.
