Results from various research studies suggest that Marketing professionals who can balance the creative and science sides of Marketing, balance the long-term with the short-term, and balance the Upstream and the Downstream stand the best chance of thriving in today’s dynamic and demanding environment. Succeeding at maintaining this balance requires making critical performance management investments. This balancing act requires a Marketing budget that includes more than the day-to-day work and the skills and technology to pull these off. Yes, the budget needs to support the everyday programmatic work associated with all the current buzzwords: content, digital, social, search, mobile, online, offline, and so on. Securing funds for these, however, requires Marketing to be able to conduct research and use data and analytics at a minimum to improve segmentation, personalization, customer engagement, and performance management. It’s this last, performance management, one that often gets short-changed.

Three Performance Management Investments to Include in Your Marketing Budget

Juggling increasing customer expectations, the multitude of communication channels, and a challenging competitive environment while trying to accelerate revenue and measure the impact of Marketing and Marketing’s value creates enormous pressure on performance and a strain on the team. We all know that today’s marketers are expected to accelerate revenue, know how to measure Marketing contribution, apply and use analytics, and run the day-to-day operations of the Marketing function. It’s a herculean task.

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Every Marketing budget should address three performance management investments beyond those needed to execute programs that will enable you to enhance your contribution to the business and keep your balance:

systems
processes
skills

These performance management investments may come in the form of adding or augmenting your marketing infrastructure, adopting technologies and platforms to automate your processes, training your team in data and analytics, or hiring more analytically-minded people.

Why these these three performance management investments?

First, data is usually not the issue for most organizations. In fact, the volume of data is continually increasing, making it harder for businesses to make sense of it. When there is so much information available from so many sources, the real challenge is often to define and agree on a set of consistent, robust top-level metrics and conducting the analysis of the data. This challenge is compounded when companies try to adopt a joined-up approach to collecting and analyzing online and offline data. The investment in skills, systems, and processes that enable you to organize your data in a more manageable and automated way is rising in importance.

Second, marketers need to be able to quantify Marketing’s value. Email and other digital forms of marketing have made it possible for almost any company to blast messages to prospects, thereby adding to the deluge of messages and clutter. It’s easy to fall into the trap of measuring quantity rather than quality. Measuring quality and effectiveness becomes a bit more difficult than measuring quantity and efficiency. Quantity is something relatively easy to do, but quality has a subjective element. Our research and those of others find that over 75% of organizations are unable to connect Marketing results to business outcomes. Knowing what data we need starts with understanding what decisions we need to make, what we want to measure and how, and how we are going to use the data to improve results. Using this approach as a starting point will help you define quality.

Third, being able to demonstrate Marketing’s value requires analyzing more than how many quality customer opportunities Marketing produces. It means we need to be able to analyze Marketing’s impact on the opportunity pipeline, category ownership, time to revenue, cost to acquire and retain, the win rate, and more. Marketing needs to be able to assess programs and channels to ascertain what combination produced the best results the most efficiently. Marketing automation tools are a great start, but to truly leverage them these tools need to be integrated with business intelligence tools or capabilities. To make these investments pay off marketers need the skills and processes in place to use them.