Marketing Governance

Two of the most valuable purposes of a marketing dashboard are to help the leadership team understand how Marketing is moving the needle in terms of top line revenue, market share, customer value, category ownership, etc., and to provide strategic guidance. However, one of more perplexing findings from the recently completed marketing performance research conducted jointly by Forrester, ITSMA and VisionEdge Marketing is that while marketers have access to more data, leverage more analytics, and invest in more tools and systems than ever before, marketers continue to struggle to prove marketings contribution to the business.  While the majority of the marketers in the study indicated they regularly produce and share a dashboard. The same survey, with results from the 400+ marketing and business leaders shows that just 9% of CEOs and 6% of CFOs use marketing data to help make strategic decisions.

So where’s the disconnect? It appears that most marketers participating in the study use their marketing automation (MAP) or sales automation (CRM) systems to create their dashboards.  While helpful, dashboards typically generated by these systems report on marketing activity and associated costs  – email activity, website activity, social media activity, lead activity- rather than reporting on metrics executives can use to set direction.  It’s not that these reports and dashboards are bad; they are valuable when used to support tactical decisions, but if you want your CEO, CFO and other members of the C-Suite to use your dashboard, it must clearly connect marketing investments and initiatives to business outcomes and results.

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VisionEdge Marketing (VEM), ITSMA, and Forrester, organizations committed to helping marketers improve their effectiveness, released the findings from their 2013 Marketing Performance Management (MPM) Survey. We made a call for that in of our previous blogs.

The 2013 MPM Survey captured input from more than 400 respondents, enabling ITSMA, Forrester, and VEM to expose valuable insights on the performance measurement and management challenges marketers face. The study, began by VEM initially, is now in its 12^th year.

Marketing Activity, Not Business Outcomes

The study reveals that few members of the C-Suite rely on marketing data to make decisions. Results show that only nine percent of CEOs and six percent of CFOs rely on marketing data to make decisions. The reason? Marketing dashboards report marketing activity rather than business outcomes. Marketers cling to metrics that measure and report marketing’s performance, continuously justifying marketing budgets and resource allocations when they should be showing how marketing moves the needle on topline growth or profitability.

“The data demonstrates how marketers rely too much on their CRM and marketing automation systems to produce dashboards or report on marketing results. These systems are fine for providing a view into marketing program activity and pipeline, but the research shows that most fail to produce the level of information and metrics that business executives want to see,” said Laura Ramos, Vice President, Principal Analyst serving CMOs at Forrester. Read More

Objectives in Operational Marketing Excellence projects are often related to the generic efficiency goals better, faster and cheaper. The concepts faster and cheaper are easy to grasp. But what makes better marketing operations? This question drove us into mythical discussions, similar to what is quality, what makes good design and -later in the evening- what is art?

Although it may sound like an easy way out, we are currently working with the concept that making things better means taking away the things that make it worse… And its up to you to decide what that is. In reality it has everything to do with risk management: often ignored by marketers, never ignored by investors.

Let’s take the old adage “Doing the right things and doing things right” as the basis. We define effectiveness as doing the right things and efficiency as doing things right, and look at the concept of risk in marketing operations. You could say that if we lower the probability and impact of “Doing the wrong things and doing the things wrong”, we are lowering risk, mitigating risk and managing risk, and thus creating value.

In Marketing Operations, we focus primarily on the execution and efficiency side, the second part of this quote, which implies that better Marketing Operations means lowering the risks of doing the things wrong.

Defining “doing things wrong” is arbitrary. Basically, things are done wrong when they do not conform to what is expected. As a consequence, risk management is impossible when it is not clear what is expected and which risks are acceptable and which aren’t.

Risk is a fact of business life. Taking and managing risk is part of what companies must do to create profits and shareholder value.

Gunnar Pritsch

Expressing and communicating management expectations about risks and better marketing operations can be done in manuals, guidelines and procedures. These tools can be integrated and embedded in processes and supported by technology. Usage can be monitored via KPIs and dashboards.

• Correct usage of these tools, processes and technology lowers the risks, creates value, and can be rewarded by management.
• Incorrect usage of these tools, processes and technology increases the risks, destroys value, and should be corrected by management.

Compliancy to internal quality standards and procedures in regards to brand, financial, and legal regulations and guidelines makes better Marketing Operations. The extent to which compliancy checks are enforced will define the value of your marketing operations considerably.