Does your C-Suite rely on Marketing data to make strategic decisions?  Our research tells us that this is still a challenge for many marketing teams.  Just 9% of CEO’s and 6% of CFO’s leverage Marketing data in this manner, according to the findings.  Why? The vast majority of Marketing dashboards report marketing activity, as marketers cling to performance metrics to justify budgets and resource allocations—when instead they should report business outcomes, which also show how marketing moves the needle on top-line growth and profitability.

What Can You Do to Make Your Marketing Data More Relevant?

1. Avoid relying too heavily on your CRM and marketing automation systems to produce dashboards or report on Marketing results. These systems are fine for providing a view into Marketing program activity and pipeline, but you need to produce the level of information and metrics that business executives want to see. Measures of operational efficiency such as on time delivery, budget, productivity, campaign performance, and lead data are the most common metrics marketing tracks and reports. If you do focus on these kinds of metrics, aim to incorporate metrics that help you improve effectiveness not just efficiency.

2. Use your data analytics to fine-tune more than the Marketing mix. Leverage data to predict customer behavior, make strategic recommendations, drive innovation, or impact customer acquisition, retention, or growth—measures that make a stronger connection between marketing activity and business outcomes, These measures improve the value of marketing, but only 35% of marketers on average use data analytics to predict customer-buying behavior.

3. Implement Marketing Operations Management. With increasing pressure from the C-Suite to prove the value of their efforts, marketing operations management has gained traction and is now a must-have for Best-In-Class marketing. In the most recent Marketing Performance Management (MPM) Benchmark Study we discovered that this role now includes the following:

• Performance measurement and reporting
• Campaign analysis and reporting
• Technology and automation and pipeline management
• Budgeting and planning; financial governance and reporting
• Data management
• Workflow process development and documentation
• Project management
• Strategic planning
• Organization benchmarking and assessments
• Customer, market, competitive intelligence, research, and insights
• Analytics and predictive modeling
• Talent and skills development

Marketing Operations Management gives marketing the opportunity to be more effective by managing and developing the process for setting performance expectations, monitoring progress, and measuring results. Even though it is the responsibility and duty of every marketer to engage in performance management, this functional role brings together all of the components needed to optimize marketing performance and ultimately enables marketing to serve as a Center of Excellence.

Purchase Your Assessment

As marketers, we are under constant pressure to prove and improve the value of our efforts. This is because revenue growth relies on becoming more competitive and getting closer to the customer, and the majority of the processes and data required to achieve these goals are under the stewardship of marketing. Providing the C-Suite with more relevant and business-outcome-focused data helps achieve corporate goals and elevates the role of marketing within the organization.

Learn more about transforming data into insights with the white paper Intuition To Wisdom: Transforming Data Into Models and Actionable Insights.

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