Marketers, do you have an internal perception problem? Does the board view your department and activities as a bottomless pit of spend with questionable ROI? If so, you’re not alone – Gartner’s recent survey reflects the belief of nonmarketing leaders who think that ‘marketing has an inflated view of its importance’, with 40% feeling that marketing becomes involved unnecessarily!
Well, we’re here to help you to work on those perceptions by demonstrating marketing’s ability to drive profit.
Firstly, a few fundamental questions:
- Are you fully informed as to the business strategy?
- Do you know what the revenue goals are?
- Do you have visibility of income and key financial metrics?
- Are you working hand in hand with sales?
- Is your whole business aligned behind providing an optimal customer experience?
If the answer to the above is yes, then that’s the foundation we need. Further to that, the answers lie in a sound strategy, responsive execution and the ability to measure success i.e. correlate marketing activities against sales outcomes.
Sound Strategy
Brand strategy is one of the cornerstones of our work with organisations. Simply put, if your business, brand and technology strategies aren’t in place, or are misaligned, then you’ll never achieve your business’s full potential. Brand strategy stands on the shoulders of business strategy, leaning into the soul of the enterprise and conveying a consistent strategic narrative.
Effective brand strategies construct shared meaning and empower the business to achieve its enterprise goals. At the same time, brand strategy relies on the technology strategy in a symbiotic relationship.
Marketing Attribution
One of the best ways to achieve a solid attribution model is through data integration from your CRM and marketing channels into an interface like Looker Studio. This allows you to track and analyse data in real-time, optimising where your marketing activities are being most effective, and making adjustments where the implementation isn’t as performant.
This level of tracking enables you to monitor your entire funnel and prove the influence of marketing on revenue.
The Impact of Brand Marketing
While performance marketing data is key to demonstrating value, the impact of brand marketing is also an important metric. Where we can demonstrate the value of Top-of-funnel (TOFU) work, we can justify long-term strategies.
You can gain a sense of the impact of brand marketing on:
- Awareness, through monitoring Google Analytics, Search Console and Trends data on brand searches, referral sites, direct traffic and conversions
- Perception, through social listening (using social media analytics), reviews and surveys
- Loyalty, through social sharing, retention and repeat business records in your CRM and your employee advocacy
- Reach, by monitoring your coverage and share of voice through things like earned media, mentions and message pull-through, backlinks, social growth and engagement, likes, comments and saves and comparing to your competitors (tools like Onclusive and SproutSocial can be useful for this).
With a myriad of marketing disciplines spanning strategy, execution, measurement and reporting being required, it’s never been more important to manage marketing operations (MarOps) effectively and efficiently. The delightful wizardry of keeping all of the MarOps plates spinning remains the domain of marketing leadership.
Tell Them What They Want to Know
Before we get carried away with all of the wonderful tools and insights that we can access to inform future strategy and activity, we need to come back to the audience and the purpose of this article. Which metrics do the Board care about, and what’s going to persuade them of marketing’s value?
We advise having a report ready with all of the information you find valuable (that’s available for the detail oriented) – but in the Boardroom context, summarising the metrics they really want to hear about. These are the ones that prove direct financial impact: revenue, profit margins, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, return on ad spend and return on investment.
“If you’re just measuring impressions or clicks, the rest of the business doesn’t care. What they care about is: is our marketing ultimately getting us more sales.”
Dan Roche
Marketing Week
Boardroom audiences often appreciate brevity, so by providing efficient analysis and succinct annotation on the things they care about, we can build trust and gain their confidence in our ability to drive profit. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for a compelling narrative. Sometimes it’s ‘the way you tell them’ as much as what you tell them!
By communicating the powerful impact of marketing activity, it becomes harder for them to justify cutting next year’s budget.
Help is at Hand
We partner with CMOs in applying The StrategiQ Framework to understand their strategic context, discover their current brand and performance position, and gather insights to ensure that we are able to create the value their board wants to see.
We provide our clients with on-demand access to real-time data dashboards and our monthly reports. These provide insight and evidence to prove the value of marketing in the Boardroom and deliver comprehensive information on how Brand ✕ Performance is driving New Future Value.
If you’d like to learn more about how we drive profit, or see examples of our measurement and reporting then please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.