Marketing accountability is about more than just coming up with a set of metrics, it is about culture and infrastructure.

Infrastructure Enables A Culture of Accountability

As a discipline that prides itself on strategic thinking and creative skills, Marketing Operations often takes a back seat. To successfully integrate a culture of Marketing accountability requires addressing change management and having the right systems in place. Here are six systems every company should address to help support a culture of Marketing accountability.

1. Alignment of Business Outcomes and Marketing Execution

It’s easy in the heat of battle to focus on all of the execution details associated with one program after another. Sadly, for many companies the marketing team is so engaged in execution they don’t have time to consider the impact of market changes and the competition.
Better alignment between the business objectives and marketing execution will significantly improve marketing’s efficiency. Better alignment can be achieved by quantifying business outcomes and integrating these into marketing performance indicators.

2. Capture and Communicate Performance

A Marketing Scorecard or Marketing Dashboard aids Marketing’s to consistently communicate its contribution an performance. The scorecard/dashboard needs to be more than a hodgepodge of numbers. Your dashboard needs metrics to provide insight into how well Marketing is moving the needle in terms of market share, customer value, and shareholder value.

3. Define and Standardize Your Marketing and Marketing Operations Plans

We’ve seen so many different marketing plans over the years. The marketing plan is not the place to demonstrate your creativity. This business document needs to be created on a standard, enterprise-wide online template that stores all the captured information as structured document. This helps ensure the consistency of information, improve collaboration, and automate the generation of reports. There should also be a consistent format for your marketing operations plans which outlines the marketing activities that will support the marketing plan.

Purchase Your Assessment

4. Track and Regularly Report

We are often the stewards of a significant part of the company’s resources. In this capacity we shoulder a significant responsibility. Part of this responsibility is to demonstrate we are exercising good judgment in using the organization’s resources and the investments being made have a positive return. We must track and generate reports that clarify where the company’s money is being spent. If you don’t have a single, online centralized system that integrates financial reporting with operational planning tools, now is the time to make this investment. It will facilitate your ability to be more agile when you need to make budget and strategy adjustment. These systems enable Marketing to share and integrate forecasting and financial scheduling data, track supplier information, supplier estimates and invoices.

5. Streamline and Automate Marketing Workflows

Define and document a uniform set of process and templates to help project managers streamline communications and manage workflow.

6. Control Marketing Assets and Improve Reuse

There are a number of key corporate assets developed and housed by Marketing. These include product and advertising photos, marketing collateral, logos. Access and retrieval of these assets should be convenient and inexpensive. Costs and time go up when assets are scattered all around, in different departments, different regions, and different agencies. Create a repository that houses all of your Marketing assets and provides controlled access to employees and partners. Be sure the creative guidelines for the brand strategy and brand identity are well documented and easy to access and update.

Adopting a culture of accountability is a vital part of serving as key members of the business team. Marketing decisions have implications on the entire business and are often the driving forces behind business success. From the executive level perspective Marketing often has a substantial percentage of the organization’s allocation of resources. We need to be accountable for these resources.  To succeed, Marketing organizations needs to adopt a culture of accountability.

How can you improve your Marketing accountability? It’s hard to know what metrics to improve without an idea of the current situation. Marketing performance audits are a must in order to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of the existing Marketing functions including the organization’s use of metrics. Your marketing performance audit should evaluate all systems, processes, skills, and resources. 

Comments are closed.