Marketing Governance

Finance departments often criticize marketing’s inability to present a tangible ROI and use financial measures. It’s a common lament and one we’ve all heard. Rob Stuart, Executive Vice President & Publisher at CFO Publishing, in a recent conversation reminds us that CFOs expect marketers to come prepared to describe what their ROI is going to be for marketing investments. CFOs want to know how marketing is going to measure success, the key performance indicators for a conference and the ROI targets. CFOs are looking at the big picture and the organization’s overall investments.

If we want the CFOs support we need forge a stronger partnership with our finance colleagues. The perception or reality of an antagonistic relationship needs to be replaced with collaboration. And one of the best way to begin to build this relationship is to work from the CFOs comfort zone: data, analytics and metrics.

You may think that you already do.  But here’s an example of how easy it is to throw things off kilter. A key source of the friction is derived from using the words with double meanings. For example, consider “brand equity”. The marketing professional uses the term to describe the health of the brand’s franchise with its key audiences; the financial professional uses it to characterize the brand as an economic asset. Whatever their differences, marketing and finance professionals need to find common ground.

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In times of crisis more then one company ceases the moment to reorganize. Sometimes because business goes bad and they just have to, sometimes because the market demands it, sometimes because management sees a good excuse to lose some weight. Most of the time it results in downsizing the workforce, but… is that really necessary. Isn’t it better to improve efficiency so your people do more with the same energy, and thus results go up?

In this infographic Jive shows you what  an reorganisation costs.

Recently one of our customers was completing their quarterly marketing report. She was frustrated because she was trying to complete nearly 500 input fields in her excel doc! Five hundred fields, yikes! Part of the reason she is collecting so many numbers is that the metrics for the marketing organization and the relationship between the various data elements are not clear. Selecting the right performance metrics and developing an actionable marketing dashboard is something many organizations are tackling. However, if the link between marketing activities and business results isn’t clear, you may find yourself wallowing in data.

For example, it’s important to be able to connect the dots between a marketing program and product trials with customer acquisition and market share. To do this will take three things: alignment, good data, and access to this data. As you grapple with measuring marketing, a key part of the work will be determining whether you have the data you need.

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Distributed Marketing

In a recent survey by the Aberdeen Group, 67% of respondents said their marketing operates in a distributed marketing environment. By the traditional definition, distributed marketing refers to a marketing model in which both a central corporate marketing department and “local” organizations or business units share authority and responsibility for making marketing decisions and performing marketing activities. The stereotypical example of a distributed marketing organization is a franchise network, but distributed marketing models exist in many kinds of organizations.

The reality is, most large companies, particularly global enterprises, use some form of a distributed marketing model. For example, marketing operations is many multinational companies are highly fragmented. Most global enterprises have regional or national marketing organizations in addition to a central corporate marketing department. These regional and/or local marketing organizations often play a significant role in the creation of marketing content and the execution of marketing programs. They usually hire their own language service providers for translation services, and they may also contract with marketing agencies to create original content or adapt “corporate” content for the local market.

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Ross Graber serves as Research Director for the Marketing Operations Strategies service at SiriusDecisions. He brings over 15 years of marketing experience with focus spanning marketing measurement, demonstrating ROI, data management, process development, marketing technology, customer marketing and sales enablement. He sheds his light on measurement tools. “The web is littered with people who know best for you and your organisation. They think they know what your marketing measurement needs to be like and look like.”

A new research report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) argues that several serious “disconnects” exist between Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and other senior company leaders (CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, etc.). Outside looking in: the CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite is based on a global survey of marketing and non-marketing executives from 19 industries in 42 countries, and on in-depth interviews with senior executives from major companies.

The EIU report shows that a significant gap exists between CMOs and the rest of the C-suite regarding marketing’s strategic priorities. EIU asked survey participants to identify marketing’s top priority. The filelink:file0 below shows how both CMOs and non-marketing executives responded

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Elements of user interface that you control are vital to the success of your marketing platform adoption & ROI.  You are developing the materials in order to be a simple, effective shortcut for your marketers while you provide them a healthy freedom within a framework.  Your goal is to make available a path to success in record time.  Saving your participants time will save your budget.  Making the items easy to navigate and locate will be one of the top contributers to user adoption success.

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