The Marketing Executives Group International

By: Ms. Connie Hill - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/constance-hill/1/897/5b6

Marketing Accountability continues to be a hot topic for senior executives and marketers alike. Of course the recent economy has put even more pressure on marketers to demonstrate the ROI of marketing programs, but a change in economic tides will not relieve the pressure. The topic will continue to be red hot until marketers adopt practices within their marketing groups that demonstrate marketing performance in terms of ROI deliverability. It’s time to stop talking and start focusing on how to provide transparency and accountability that is both efficient and scalable.

The fact is those marketers who have already created processes that deliver routine accountability are experiencing positive benefits. Marketers tell me that the increased visibility into program and campaign performance has enabled them to make better decisions based on facts, which resulted in higher levels of program and individual successes. Reports and surveys validate these claims. For example, Lenskold’s Marketing ROI and Measurement study revealed that “companies that indicated their marketing was highly effective and efficient showed much greater strength in having data, facts, and insight to better guide marketing spending decisions.” The study also cites that having good measurements, using customer analytics, and having marketing operations processes improve the business of marketing. From a professional career perspective, marketers are also reporting budget increases, increases in trust and expansions in roles and influence.

How can you achieve true accountability?

There has been plenty published about marketing dashboards as a solution, and many functional marketing technologies, such as CRM, web analytics, campaign management systems or lead generation solutions have marketing dashboards attached to them. The fact is a functional dashboard alone will not provide the holistic understanding of marketing’s ROI. Why? Because there is no guarantee that customers will react and respond in the media channel that delivered the communication. To gain true performance visibility, marketing must have access to real data from multiple channels and multiple systems that are designed to support the various functions throughout the company.

One way marketers try to gain visibility and provide accountability is to capture reports generated by multiple systems and piece together information using reporting tools such as crystal reports or MS Excel. While this process may be manual, time consuming and at risk of inaccuracy, the process at least provides a level of insight toward marketing performance and what can be done to improve it, and offers a level of accountability reporting; the issue becomes scalability, cost and speed.

A Framework for Automating Accountability Reporting

The following framework can move marketers beyond manual aggregation to automating reports and enabling 360° analysis that drives decisions that improve financial return on investment.

1: Build a data repository or data mart for marketing use.
Data marts are unique to each business and should be designed based on marketing’s objectives, key performance indicators and the collection of customer data. If you already collect data to build your own reports, you are half way home. Determine the source of data collected for your current analysis routines. Consider additional data such as web analytics, CRM, service groups, call centers, financial data, sales data, campaign data and product data. By applying automated extract, transform and load routines (ETL) into your data mart, you will achieve daily data flowing into your data mart--versus the report delivery waiting game.
Many companies have data structure specialists within the IT organization. These specialists can help you through the technical processes. As an alternative, some marketing technology service providers specialize in data mart design and development, and can host your data mart in the software-as-a-service model.

2: Add dashboard visualization.
To effectively monitor marketing performance, create a visual marketing dashboard. With data contained in your data mart and through program calculations, a dashboard can display campaign ROI, actual versus projected by campaign, sales, conversions or visual representation of performance measures executives want in accountability reporting. Visualization tools are not expensive and most mining and analysis tools provide them.

3: Analyze and understand performance.
The addition of an analysis tool provides drill down ability and deep understanding of campaign results. Analysis tools answer marketing’s critical questions such as: How did my campaign perform? Why? How did customers react? How can this campaign performance be improved? And because your data mart is capturing response data, the closed loop methodology creates a continuous improvement cycle and provides complete transparency. Business intelligence tools are also available in a software-as-a-service model. Data mart solution providers typically provide the hosting of an analysis tool, in addition to providing the hosting of your data mart.

4: Mine the data for customer insights.
Since the data mart contains interaction data from multiple customer touch points within your organization, you can begin to understand the behaviors of your customers. You can also identify customer channel preference(s), design offers or loyalty programs based on what the customer values, and develop strategies that extend the relationship life of your most valuable customers. Customer insight drives improved campaign performance.

5: Take action!
Insight is only valuable when you take action through targeted campaigns and programs. The insight you gained in data mining can be made actionable through improved segmentation or targeting, the elimination of programs that prove not to work and investing in those that do. It’s the action you take and the incremental profits you achieve that delivers the ROI on the performance management system.

Conclusion
Marketers can not escape the demand for accountability. For those willing to embrace the concept, the benefits create better marketing performance as well as professional recognition. Moving forward, speed and scalability will become a greater issue as more and more marketers advance their processes to manage campaign performance and deliver accountability. Automation of these processes is both practical and affordable. Greater levels of success await those marketers willing to embrace accountability and marketing performance management.

About the Author:
Ms. Connie Hill is President and Founder of VeraCentra, an innovative leader of on demand marketing software and services. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/constance-hill/1/897/5b6