Live blog post from the Online Marketing Summit - Day 1 #OMSummit. Presented by Laura Patterson, VisionEdge Marketing. Author of Marketing Metrics in Action - Creating a Performance Driven Marketing Organization.
(Editors Note: Sorry about any spacing issues. They will be fixed)
Why Companies Invest in Marketing
- Acquire more of something faster and less expensively (higher ROI)
- Need to demonstrate we are getting the job done. Otherwise we might as well put more feet on the street.
- "The top challenge for marketers remains to better quantify and measure the value of marketing programs in spite of improvements in accountability over previous years" - CMO Council
- Our job is to create customers
Three Key Shirts We Must Make
- Speak the Language of Business
- Create clear line of sight between marketing activities and investments with business outcomes.
- Select and report relevant metrics.
Senior Management Vs Marketing
Why Measure? It's Hard!
- Communicate Impact
- Be seen as accountable
- Demonstrate financial value
- Enable us work smarter
- Provide a current picture (market share, product margins, close rate)
- Indicate future performance (projected revenue, share of wallet, net advocacy)
- Empower marketing - influence decisions, recommend actions, play a strategic role.
CEO feedback on study what they graded their marketing teams
- Alignment
- Accountability
- Analytics
- Automation
- Alliances
- Assessment
Performance Reporting
- What are the performance targets (this is one of the most overlooked and ridiculous oversights out there). Set Targets and goals!!
- Accountability reams reporting
- Reporting leads us to a dashboard
- Effective dashboard begin with strategic analysis that includes performance target setting and alignment of the marketing strategy with the business strategy
- By consolidating KPIs into a dashboard, marketing executives and personnel can track and manage performance, provide information to upper management, etc.
- Dashboards play a critical role in communicating value, enabling course corrections, and investment allocations.
- What was the promise to outcome, timeframe and cost and how did you compare?
Start with Alignment
- Has all necessary indicators on it to say you're in trouble or not, or doing well
- Enables organizations to measure, monitor and manage business activities using both financial and non-financial measures
- Know how to best allocate future resources
Only Three Things Marketers Need to Do:
- Find / Secure Profitable Customers (Acquisition) - market share
- Keep Customers (Penetration) - lifetime value
- Grow the Value of Customers (Monetization) - brand / customer equity
5 Signs you have a good dashboard:
- Multidimensional view of data and their interrelationships
- Communicates marketing contribution
- Creates closer alignment with other parts of the business
- Alerts users to values that are significantly above or below expectations
- Facilitates action and changed direction (tells you what to do and what to focus on)
Dashboard Building Blocks
- Metrics and KPIs - figure out what they are (somewhere between 8 - 20 only!)
- Metric - a numerical measure that represents a piece of business data (ex # of customer conversations / week / conversion rate)
- KPIs - A Metric that is tied to a target disigned to provide visibility into performance
What Questions Should EVERY Program Ask - for EVERY project?
- What business outcome are we trying to impact?
- How do you expect this program / activity to contribute (what needle needs to move and how far)
- How will we know and measure that this program achieved the objective(s)?
- What metrics would you expect to see?
- What data will help you understand our current state?
- What data and measures will communicate the program's effectiveness and value?
Three Layers to the Marketing Dashboard
- Executive Level (Bosses and Owners)
- Operational Level (Management)
- Tactical Level (Front Line)
Planning, analytics, measurement, and reporting tool - what's your blueprint?
- Tactics - Tactical Level
- Program - Tactical level / Operational level
- Objective - Operational Level / Executive Level
- Outcome - Executive Level
You should be setting:
- Target: ____
- Actual: ____
- Variance: ____
- Data Source: ____
Three Layers to the Marketing Dashboard
- Executive Level (Bosses and Owners)
- Operational Level (Management)
- Tactical Level (Front Line)
Start with the Dashboard Purpose
- Who are the dashboard stakeholders
- How will they use the dashboard
- What decisions do you want them to be able to make?
Creating a proper dashboard takes about 18 months to do properly
ESSENTIAL METRICS ON AN Executive Dashboard - a minimum of 6 items to report on:
- customer acquisition and retention #s
- customer advocacy and vlaue
- customer equity
- product innovation and adoption
- competiive positioning / market value index (rate of growth, share of preference)
- sales results
A leader only think about these things:
- Multi-touch (attribution)
- Multi-Channel (attribution)
- Data and analytics
- Value and Impact.