It wasn’t that long ago that getting a list from a creative test, great response rates, or website traffic was enough to declare Marketing’s success. Today Marketing is being asked to do a better job of showing how they are moving the needle. Marketing professionals are under continuous pressure to justify budgets, quantify results, demonstrate ROI, and prove our contribution toward achieving the corporate strategy and goals. To successfully meet this challenge, Marketing needs a performance management framework.

Purchase Your Assessment

What a Performance Management Framework?

Frameworks provide a way to structure an idea or concept.  Organizations create business frameworks to describe how something works or would work.  People develop frameworks to help them achieve a particular initiative or manage change.

In today’s environment, achieving growth and creating value often takes a number of orchestrated efforts. It is not a solo act. Marketing is just one member of the orchestra. What’s important to have a clear understanding how Marketing adds value to these initiatives.

Marketing Performance Framework Needs to Connect Marketing to the Business not Sales

Too often, Marketing tries to isolate its measures to a specific effort, such as leads or sales.  It makes more sense to build a framework that connects Marketing to the business outcomes it is expected effectively impact.  Therefore, focus on building a framework that that provides the linkages between Marketing activities, performance and these business outcomes. Such a framework will impact the way we manage our performance. If you as the leader of or in the Marketing function now is a good time to construct a Marketing Performance Management (MPM) framework.!

MPM helps us understand, align and improve the performance of our marketing efforts; as well as quantify how marketing contributes to our company’s overall success. An MPM framework helps you define, manage, and improve your metrics. By building this framework, you will have the ability to define your goals, objectives and supporting metrics, and then manage them over time to ensure that you are able to meet (or exceed) expectations.

Start Constructing Your Performance Management Framework Today

There are five initial steps to creating a marketing performance management framework.

1. Assess your current metrics and their relevance to corporate strategy and outcomes – throw away metrics that are not aligned with outcomes and strategy
2. Create a metrics map that links outcomes with marketing objectives, strategies and tactics
3. Define each metric, it’s data source, how it is calculated
4. Develop initiatives to achieve the performance targets
5. Establish a set of performance targets that are market and customer centric; consider measures and metrics for each of these categories:
   • Pipeline Health and Performance
   • Channel Coverage
   • Customer Value
   • Innovation Pipeline
   • Market Growth
   • Competitive Health
   • Customer and Deal Profitability

You now are on your way to building your MPM framework! You’ve aligned Marketing performance to the business, you’ve identified metrics and performance targets to support these, and you’ve created initiatives designed to move the needle.

Take your Marketing Performance Management to greater heights.

FAQ:

1. Assess current metrics for relevance to strategy and outcomes; eliminate those that aren’t aligned.
2. Create a metrics map linking outcomes with Marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics.
3. Define each metric, its data source, and calculation method.
4. Develop initiatives to achieve performance targets.
5. Establish market- and customer-centric performance targets across categories such as pipeline health, channel coverage, customer value, innovation, market growth, competitive health, and profitability.

Comments are closed.