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| Your Investments in Business Development and Marketing |
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Measurement and accountability is one of marketing’s biggest problems. How is it handled in your company? Are investments linked to measurable results? Improvement of marketing performance, and specifically the ability to pinpoint the drivers and detractors for performance, should be the essence of marketing. Improvement of marketing performance, and specifically the ability to pinpoint the drivers and detractors for performance, should be the essence of marketing. The ability to analyze performance across all activities and generate improved results defines the desired outcome and goal marketers are looking for. · Do you know what drives value in your company? · Do you and your top team share a common vision and strategy? · Are you prioritizing those actions critical to growth? · Are you revisiting the same challenges over and over? · How would you know if you are achieving the results you need? Every business and every business function must set goals, work toward achieving them, and then measure the results. Marketing is usually good at the first two but fails short on the third. So it is not surprising the marketing budgets are the first ones to be cut. Manufacturing people can demonstrate how investments in new equipment will cut labor costs. The CTO can reasonably estimate the performance and cost improvements that go hand in hand with a system upgrade. But when the CMO proposes a campaign, the CEO can only guess the results. R&D people can justify improvements to existing products or the need for a new product. How can you do it? Technology can certainly help. One way is tracking email and direct mail campaigns and the revenues they produce. You can also use technology to sort customers in terms of loyalty and profitability. The short term benefits of price promotions can also be measured and tabulated. This ability to measure costs and responses provides greater predictability to marketing investments. Predictability is important to decision making. By analyzing the process, results and lessons, the company can plan its next budget year, goals and objectives with greater confidence, armed with realistic goals, data and information. Areas that can and should be measured as part of the business development plan and marketing strategy: · Sales revenues · Brand awareness · Customer satisfaction After marketing has done its job, it is time for the sales force, the ad agency, and product developers, customer fulfillment, and all other players to do theirs, and take responsibility for their own metrics. |