Metrics, without a doubt, play a pivotal role in shaping our operational discipline, assessing the efficiency of activities, and validating the achievement of business goals.
For us marketers, the metrics we choose to report (or neglect) send profound messages regarding our perception of our role in business growth and how we aim to contribute. Offering a narrow scope of metrics might inadvertently provide our peers with a skewed or limited understanding of marketing’s holistic role and significance. A limited metrics view can paint marketing as a minor player in the vast field of business expansion and evolution.
How to Design an Effective Marketing Metrics Blueprint
Before diving into crafting your roadmap, one must first pinpoint the most salient pieces of information. The essence is to have a panoramic view of your business impact. Key considerations might be:
Metrics that influence the income statement like sales revenues or those that affect the balance sheet like the value of brand equity.
Whether the metrics provide a retrospective view (e.g., past quarter’s performance) or offer a prospective lens (e.g., anticipated customer lifetime value).
Metrics that span a single duration, like a specific campaign, or those that stretch across multiple periods, like enhancing in-market testing capabilities.
As a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), it’s crucial to arrange a coherent set of potential metrics chronologically. While this sequence will differ for each enterprise, a generic blueprint might commence with:
Campaign Metrics: Begin with gauging the success rate of marketing initiatives like promotional campaigns. Key questions might include: Was the campaign effective? Did it provide a good return on investment? However, while crucial, these metrics alone aren’t sufficient, as most stakeholders outside marketing often have the baseline expectation that campaigns should be successful.
Sales and Customer Satisfaction Metrics : This is where most marketers seem to be investing their time and effort, focusing on metrics like revenue growth and net promoter score.
Brand Value Metrics : Given the competitive landscape of the digital age, brand value has never been more paramount. Metrics to consider here include brand awareness, brand equity value, and perceptions of brand quality.
Capabilities Metrics : These delve into the value created by marketing through the introduction and use of new tools, processes, or data. Examples include enhancing e-commerce capabilities or improving customer lifetime value.
Enterprise-level Metrics : These gauge the broad-scale impact of marketing. For instance, HR might leverage brand value for recruitment, or corporate strategy teams might utilize customer insights for market differentiation.
Interestingly, according to a recent survey, while most senior marketers acknowledge the criticality of brand value, there’s a staggering dearth of metrics related to it. This disparity could be attributed to marketers getting entangled in justifying sales metrics, the technical challenges in proving attribution, or other internal dynamics.
Conclusion
To truly encapsulate marketing’s expansive influence, we need to acknowledge and measure its myriad roles: from campaign efficacy, sales, brand value, capabilities to its impact across diverse business functions. A well-thought-out marketing metrics roadmap not only underscores marketing’s multi-faceted contribution but also enlightens the C-suite about its encompassing value across the organization. In doing so, it positions marketing as not just a sales-support entity but as a significant pillar in the organization’s growth and transformation journey.