According to a recent survey reported in Marketing Week, 73% of CEOs believe marketing professionals lack credibility at the board table because of the inability to evidence results. Similarly, a Deloitte and CIM report last year found that 49% of companies are not using a customer or marketing measure to inform board level decision making.
For most this is no revelation, more a reminder of the recurrent challenge for marketers to deliver numbers for numbers – a situation that’s intensified markedly in recent years. Before global recession was announced, as long as consumers spent and companies profited, indulging a portion of budget on non-traceable marketing activity was professionally more acceptable.
Parallel with this growing quest to deliver defined results has been the ascent of digital. As a medium with near infinite trackability, it’s been something of a miracle cure for marketers eager to prove the impact of their spend. However, with such accessible data comes the pitfall of judging rates of interaction as ROI evidence. Knowing your latest email campaign achieved a CTR of 35% can be very gratifying, but to hold water in the board room, such figures must be mapped through to a bottom line metric.
Measurement for some businesses is easy; for example the results from McDonald’s’ discounted door drops will tell its marketers which postcode likes Big Macs the most, and importantly allow them to divide Big Mac sales in those areas by the amount spent on designing, printing and delivering the voucher. For many other businesses however, especially B2B, real ROI is a more elusive number. To get to a figure which draws the attention and respect of the CEO means working very closely with all areas of the business to gain a holistic view of the cause and effect of marketing’s activity. Incorporating sales or service department metrics into your MI dashboard could reveal some interesting effects of your activity – collectively building the case for marketing’s value.
Balloon dog’s own Brand Payback™ approach starts by defining exactly what ROI means to a client, and how much of it they need to meet their goals. Whilst it can come as a shock to new clients to find an agency asking to be judged on results, it sets a clear basis for the partnership at the outset, helping us to know where to aim our energies, and clients to see how we’ve performed for them.
One factor preventing the industry from improving ROI measurement is the reluctance to test. For many the conflict between continuing to deliver short-term sales goals whilst investing budget in experimentation is a quandary. Nevertheless, structured testing is a great way to gain the insight and confidence marketers need to innovate and steal a march on competitors. For this very reason, many of balloon dog’s major clients invest a percentage of their annual budgets exploring the tactics that will make up their mainstream strategies of tomorrow.
Of course smaller budgets make such testing more of a challenge, but there are still ways to gain the insights of testing with limited budget. One of which is syndicated testing. By forming cross-sector discovery groups, marketers can pool their test budgets to find out which new methods are really performing. Whilst you wouldn’t disclose your latest secret weapon with your competition, sharing these insights with a trusted set of peers in other sectors makes sense, and would guarantee a more robust result from a combined investment. Such a co-op reduces reliance on data provided by media owners and agents, giving a more objective base from which to plan.
We also need to talk their language more fluently, the more we can present our results in terms which CEOs and FDs instinctively relate to, the more airtime we’ll be given as an industry. Talking about marketing’s effect in the context of the whole business will add weight to any presentation.
Taking these points on board could help to close the respect gap we as marketers currently face. So set the right measure for your business, account for the whole effect, and go show the CEO!
