Marketing Metrics Your CEO Cares About
The internal presentation of campaign effectiveness is equally as integral to a marketer’s role as is the forward-facing messaging of the brand itself. A marketer who is adept at presenting the right metrics up the chain internally can proactively pinpoint what data is needed along the way to inform the successes and areas for improvement in their efforts. However, many marketers are shucking their responsibilities when it comes to data.
It’s time marketers take analytical accountability for their actions. The right data can help you come to company meetings prepared with the marketing metrics your CEO cares about.
Scrambling to gather and make sense of end-of-quarter data is not only a recipe for inaccuracy – it indicates that marketing efforts have been essentially “flying blind” for the quarter. While quarterly reporting is of course an informative and necessary exercise, proactive marketers operate with a real-time feedback loop of data rather than an end-of-quarter data dump. So amidst all the buzz about data-driven marketing, what is keeping everyone from implementing a data-driven approach?
Pressure to Prove ROI
When it comes to reporting on marketing effectiveness, it seems that many CMOs feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. Marketers feel more pressure to prove the ROI of their campaigns, but are also increasingly insecure about their ability to gather and attribute the right data to efforts at different stages of the customer relationship.
According to the 2013 CMO Survey sponsored by the Duke Fuqua School of Business, 66.4% of marketers reported feeling pressure from their CEO or Board to prove the value of marketing. And that pressure shows no signs of slowing down; the same survey found 60.1% of marketers expect the pressure to prove the ROI of their efforts to increase in 2014.
So while 2/3 of marketers in 2013 felt they had their feet to the fire, more marketers may be sweating their numbers as the year progresses.
The results from the 2013 CMO Survey pointed towards a lack of data and analytical review as the underlying factor preventing marketers from adequately articulating their campaign effectiveness.
From August 2012 to August 2013, the percentage of CMOs reporting that they do not formally evaluate the quality of marketing analytics rose 13.9%, from 53.2% to 67.1%. That means 2/3 of CMOs cannot testify to the quality of the data they are presenting up the chain to their CEO and stakeholders.
Without the confidence and quality in the data behind a campaign, the ability for marketers’ efforts to play an integral role in the company’s overall direction diminishes in tandem. The 2013 CMO Survey also found a correlation between the rise in the percentage of marketers who do not evaluate the quality of marketing analytics and a drop in the contribution of marketing analytics to the company’s overall performance.
A data-driven marketer can and should contribute positively to the company’s overall performance. So what is the chief data issue that is contributing to marketers’ inability to communicate effectively with their CEO and stakeholders?
Data Overload
According to a study conducted by Terdata, 75% of marketers report challenges in calculating the ROI of their efforts. The study, which surveyed 2,200 marketers from around the globe, found that less than 10% of marketers use their data in a systematic way, and yet 45% of marketers agree that data is the most underutilized asset in the marketing organization.
So rather than feeling that analytical ignorance is bliss, marketers are acutely aware of the importance of data-driven marketing. In fact, in Terdata’s research, 78% of marketers reported pressure to become more data-driven.
As the number of channels for the distribution of content and brand messaging multiply, there are more and more opportunities for data feedback. And while the pace of diversification in digital marketing is certainly exciting, it makes data aggregation all the more challenging. Consumer content overload has been hyped ad nauseam, but data overload is plaguing marketers on the back end.
Marketers are less challenged in calculating the relative costs of their various efforts, but reporting that you are over or under budget is not a metric your CEO cares about on its own. A budgetary summary of marketing efforts must be paired with touchpoint data about how that spending advanced customers down the pipeline.
There may be an implicit emphasis from the C-suite on proving how marketing efforts are contributing to the bottom line, but marketers would be remiss to over-simplify the conversion from lead to customer. There may be many touchpoints that helped nudge someone from prospect to lead, lead to customer, and customer to brand evangelist. The more marketers accept the data scientist side of themselves, the better they can plan to gather the data they need to prove their own worth.
Of course, there is software and innovations in technology to supplement and simplify the analysis of digital marketing efforts and the effectiveness at various touchpoints. Armed with the right data, proactive marketers can prepare to face the top-down stress to prove ROI, and articulate which efforts are effective in streamlining the sales funnel.
So don’t be caught flat-footed as the quarter comes to a close. Be accountable for your data and prepare to prove what is working, what isn’t, and how you can turn the latter into the former.
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Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
