The Blurring Line between Marketing Analyst and Marketing Strategist

Marketers everywhere know they need to increase their analytical and marketing accountability prowess. However, this effort is only worth the investment of time, people and money if you can use these capabilities to drive strategic decisions, actionable recommendations, and improve and prove marketing effectiveness. In fact, we believe the line between marketing analyst and marketing strategist will increasingly blur. Strategists need the analytics to stay ahead of emerging opportunities, respond quickly to unexpected threats, and make timely decisions.

Demystifying Marketing Metrics

Challenging and highly competitive business environments. Channel proliferation. The need to prove and improve marketing ROI.  Budgets on the chopping block. Perceived primarily as an expense, Marketing executives face many obstacles. One of the only ways to avoid being “sliced and diced” is to generate measurable value and demonstrate Marketing’s impact on the bottom line.

The recent weaknesses in the economy are becoming more widespread, suggesting we may all be tightening our belts a bit more soon. We should anticipate that marketing budgets will be under even more scrutiny, and marketing professionals will be held even more accountable for the money they invest on behalf of the company. Our assessments generally reveal that marketing organizations have too many tactical measures and not enough metrics that look at market or customer indicators or that directly link marketing efforts to specific business outcomes. As a result, the marketing leadership doesn’t have a way to measure and communicate its value within, across and up a set of relevant metrics that would enable marketers to sift through and prioritize the many requests it receives for marketing assistance. If this is your case, this article outlines five suggestions for how to tackle the situation.

To Survive and Thrive Takes Analytical Muscle
Is the CMO on the verge of extinction? This article looks at how the role and impact of the CMO has evolved over the years. The article offers practical survival tips and guidelines to ensure the CMO can thrive in today’s market.

Ten Questions Every CEO Should Ask Their Marketing Leadership
Increased competition, successfully bringing new products to market, and a renewed focus on customer engagement are making Marketing increasingly important to corporate success. Many CEOs don’t have the time to focus on marketing challenges, delegating them instead to the marketing organization. Marketing has a better chance of success when the CEO takes a role in insuring that the marketing function is aligned with the overall direction of the company. This article explores the role the CEOs plays in the establishing the success factors and metrics for marketing and provides 10 questions CEOs should ask their marketing leadership.

Creating a Strategy Roadmap for Marketing Operations
Creating a strategy roadmap communicates that the marketing operations has evolved into a bona-fide force within the organization. A strategy roadmap enables marketing operations to go beyond metrics and dashboards to serving as a key player within the marketing function. The strategy roadmap enables marketing operations to manage marketing from an end-to-end perspective.

For Whom the Bell Tolls- Not Necessarily the CMO
Is the CMO on the verge of extinction? This article looks at how the role and impact of the CMO has evolved over the years. The article offers practical survival tips and guidelines to ensure the CMO can thrive in todayís market.

Making Demand Generation Measure Up
In the 21st Century marketing must serve as a catalyst for creating customer value and renew our emphasis on identifying, evaluating and selecting ideal market opportunities, and then developing the strategies for achieving leadership in these target markets. It is marketing’s responsibility to help businesses understand what customers want to buy, define how the business define the products to bring to market and ultimately position those products in the marketplace to stimulate demand for them. To achieve this outcome, Marketing must design demand generation initiatives that help businesses attract better customers. This article offers five immediate steps any company can take to improve its demand generation prowess and suggests marketing metrics that should be monitored to ensure demand generation programs measure up.

Taking on the Metrics Challenge
The article suggests a framework for marketers by presenting a continuum for marketing metrics that can be applied to move the measurement of marketing forward. Examples are provided to illustrate how two companies learned the value of moving forward along the continuum by incorporating the right metrics into assessing the overall performance of their marketing efforts.

Which Metrics Measure Marketing’s Impact on Business and Influence Strategic Direction?
Companies continue to struggle with the contradiction between priorities and action. The need and opportunity remains for marketing to improve the linkage between marketing expenditures and delivered results. This article presents the reader with a metrics continuum to show how metrics evolve from activity-based to operational-based activities. In addition, the article presents some new ideas on how to focus marketing metrics around business outcomes and how to develop quality metrics that will help provide insight into how marketing is making a contribution to the company and how to demonstrate that contribution to senior management.

A Five-Step Customer Experience Mapping Process to Improve Customer Retention
Today, the products and services a company produces are not enough to differentiate one organization from another. Therefore, organizations must seek new ways to stand out from the competition. The quality of the customer experience can serve as an important differentiator and customer retention driver. This article outlines a process to map and measure the customer experience. When deployed, the process can reveal what truly matters to your customers’ provide guidance for establishing a set of internal metrics to measure the quality of the customer experience and insight into the customer interactions that are critical to a quality experience.

Applying Six Sigma to Marketing to Grow Revenue
This article addresses the application of Six Sigma to marketing as a way to grow revenue. Six Sigma enables companies to improve marketing’s strategic, tactical and operational processes as a way to enhance the top line to drive revenue. By applying Six Sigma to marketing, you can develop an efficient marketing workflow, identify leading indicators of growth and become proactive about performance improvement. Six Sigma provides both a methodology for process improvement and a way for marketing to prove its value.

The Quality Marketing: Making Marketing More Strategic
In various studies over the course of the past year, accountability has surfaced as one of the top issues in the minds of marketers everywhere. From the Association of National Advertisers, to Frost & Sullivan, to IDC and to the CMO Council, marketing accountability has been front and center at conferences and in papers. The reason is that CEOs are demanding more accountability from marketing. This article explains how to focus marketing metrics around business outcomes so that you may develop quality metrics that will help you provide insight into the ways that your marketing efforts are contributing to the success of your company.In addition, the article discusses how to demonstrate that contribution to senior management.

The Science Side of Marketing and the Emergence of Marketing Operations
Today’s business climate calls for accountability across all departments, including marketing. Marketing Performance Management (MPM) requires on-going focus and accountability. The Marketing Operations function provides an ideal home for the day-to-day responsibilities around MPM. This article discusses how marketing operations enables companies to outline goals and expectations to determine their measure of success and supports marketing dashboard development.

Please, Sir, Can I Have Some More? How to Strengthen Your Relationship with the CFO
Laura Patterson, president and cofounder of VisionEdge Marketing, a metrics-based strategic marketing firm, recently sat down with ITSMA to discuss what marketers need to do to gain credibility with the CFO, the types of metrics they need to pay more attention to, and why being able to build better business cases can be a big boon for the marketing department.

The Twelve Best Marketing Metrics for Marketing Performance
Without metrics to track performance, marketing and business plans are ineffective. Businesses need to know which success factors require meaning and understand the difference between measurements-the raw outcomes of quantifying; metrics-ideal standards for measurement; and benchmarks-the standards by which all others are measured. This article suggests twelve metrics that can provide a starting point for businesses starting to track their marketing performance.

Metrics and the Buying Pipeline
Metrics are a part of our everyday lives. There are metrics for everything from our heart rate to our pay rate; from earnings per share to market share. Just as in everyday life, there are metrics to indicate the helath of a business and marketing’s impact. Since for most companies, sales is the name of the game. The sales pipeline is a key tool companies use to understand their potential revenue stream. Marketing plays a critical role in developing this pipeline. The more you understand how they buy, that is, their buying decision process, the greater the likelihood your sales and marketing efforts will be successful. This article looks at how understanding the buying process allows you to build a buying pipeline and explores metrics that will align your sales and marketing efforts.

Measuring Marketing Performance-Making the Shift to Outcome-Based Metrics
“Marketing has been the main responsibility for achieving profitable revenue growth for the company,” claims Philip Kotler. Kotler suggests that achieving profitable revenue growth is derived from finding, keeping and growing profitable customers. This article discusses how marketers can easily connect these three marketing roles with three specific business outcomes: market share, lifetime value and brand equity and the metrics to support each.

The Role of Culture in the Marketing Accountability Journey
For years, most departments and functions within the business have been held accountable for their performance. The key exception to this has been marketing. With increased pressure for performance across the enterprise, clearly we need to create a culture of accountability for marketing. This article discusses what is meant by a culture of accountability and the linkages between culture, leadership and performance. The article presents a culture of accountability litmus test and identifies four steps for creating a culture of accountability.

Your Business Goals: Beacon or Fog Bank?
Managing marketing’s performance and demonstrating the function’s contribution to the company begins with aligning marketing with the business goals. How many times have you heard someone express their company’s goals as “Our goal this year is to get closer to our customers.” Or “Next year’s top priority is to launch our next generation product.” Or perhaps, “The most important business goal for marketing next year is to generate more leads.”

Making Your Way Along the Marketing Metrics Continuum
Today’s business climate requires high accountability for anyone responsible for marketing. According to IDC, marketing typically invests/spends 3-8% of company revenue for its efforts. Marketers in every segment and company are being asked to account for how they invest the company’s resources and demonstrate how they impact the business. The Chief Marketing Officer Council considers Marketing Performance Measurement (MPM) to be the greatest and most important consideration for their company in the next one to two years (based on the result of a recent CMO Council survey). This article provides a framework to help marketers understand the various ways to measure marketing.

If You Don’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It. The Best Marketing Metrics for Managing Marketing Performance.
Metrics are a part of our everyday lives-from our heart rate, to our bank balances; from our weight to the gas mileage on our cars. If we don’t pay attention to these numbers, we create the risk of a heart attack, being overdrawn, or running out of gas. The same is true in the business environment. If a company doesn’t identify and track important performance measures, its risk is increased.

Measures for the C-Suite
Are marketers measuring what their chief executives want them to measure? Is the attention of the marketing suite monopolized by the minutiae of click-throughs, downloads, touch points and impressions to the exclusion of that one, key metric expected of them: company growth? The answer, according to a new survey by consultancy VisionEdge Marketing, is yes. “Marketers are not measuring value,” said VisionEdge President Laura Patterson. “Most companies have high expectations that marketing will bring in new business, but many haven’t done a good job here. Marketers aren’t measuring things that are tied to business outcomes.”

Tackling the “Too Hard To” Pile of Marketing Accountability
If youíre like us, you probably have one of those piles on your desk that keeps being moved from one corner to another. You know that pile you need to get to but avoid because it will take some real effort to tackle. For many marketing professionals, marketing accountability, analytics and ROI are in this pile. Not too long ago at a marketing conference where Laura was speaking, the organizers had set up round tables with specific topics for discussion over breakfast. Laura was sitting at the measuring marketing ROI (return on investment) table (of course, where else would I be sitting?) which was strategically located right next to the buffet line. While she was sitting there waiting for people to join her, she kept hearing people say, “Oh measuring marketing, that’s just too hard.” There were hundreds of marketers attending this conference, and about 2 dozen tables of 10 were set to accommodate the early risers. Yet only four other brave souls joined her.

Not All Customers Are Alike: How ING Retooled Its Metrics and Doubled Its Conversion Rate
Whether your business is large or small, it’s a good idea to figure out how to optimize your marketing investments and measure marketing’s impact. That’s exactly what the ING Retail Annuity Group did when it undertook an initiative to develop a set of mission-critical marketing metrics and a dashboard. But the initiative led to results that went beyond Jason’s expectations. Before the ING Retail Annuity Market Segment put the new metrics in place, the group’s measurements were based on response data and anecdotal feedback from salespeople. Plus the market segment relied on the results from the annual customer satisfaction survey, which focuses on satisfaction primarily related to sales and operations.

Tune Your Marketing Organization For Peak Performance
The rubber hits the road when it comes to achieving performance targets. This is why performance management is so important to the CEO and leadership team. Without performance management, the organization will not understand how success is measured. Essentially performance management is “the process of measuring progress toward achieving key outcomes and objectives in order to optimize individual, group or organizational performance.” Many organizations have been able to apply the concept of performance management to various parts of a business for quite some time such comes as manufacturing, logistics, sales and product development. The time is right to be use performance management to make sure your marketing organization is tuned for peak performance.

Bridging the Gap: A Way to Manage Performance Pressure
In today’s environment, marketing teams are under increased pressure to manage smarter, act more like a business, and improve and report performance. And they’re expected to do this while every aspect of marketing is under scrutiny and budgets are at risk. This intense pressure to perform is forcing many marketing organizations to explore how to do a better job of optimizing their resources and maximizing their results.

Bridging the Gap: Unlocking the Power of Your Marketing Dashboard (Part 1)
Dashboards seem to be all the rage these days. The pressure todemonstrate value, be more accountable and improve marketing ROI isdriving their developmentóthe 2008 VEM marketing performance survey,released earlier this year, reveals that the C-suite still feelsmarketing largely falls short in these area. And research from Aberdeenfound that half of the 725 enterprises they recently surveyed aboutdashboards are currently launching a marketing dashboard or plan to doso.

Measuring Social Marketing and Media
Hardly a week goes by when you donít read or hear about social marketing or social media. As more and more companies invest resources into social media and marketing itís natural to bring to question how to measure the value of this investment. As with any initiative, you can measure the impact of a social media effort only after youíve determined the business outcome it supports and established performance-based objectives. This article offers one possible approach is to measure your social media similar to how you measure public relations (PR) using outputs, outcomes and business results as the basis of your framework.

Bridging the Gap: Unlocking the Power of Your Marketing Dashboard (Part 2)
Many companies are attempting or building a marketing dashboard in order to communicate marketingís payback and value. The authors identifies two that continuously come up when reviewing a company’s existing dashboard. First, there are too many measurements. And second, the dashboard isnít measuring the right things. This article provides guidelines for selecting the metrics and key performance indicators for the marketing dashboard.

Bridging the Gap: Measuring the Value of Social Marketing and Media
eMarketer estimates that social network ad spending will be $1.3 billion in 2009. As more and more companies invest resources into social media and marketing itís natural to bring to question how to measure the value of this investment. As with any initiative, you can measure the impact of a social media effort only after youíve determined the business outcome it supports and established performance-based objectives. This article offers one possible approach is to measure your social media similar to how you measure public relations (PR) using outputs, outcomes and business results as the basis of your framework.

Benchmarking – A Best-Practice for Improving Marketing Performance – Part One
While the economy certainly weighs heavy on all of our minds, marketers who use this opportunity wisely to improve performance and demonstrate their value will fare the best. Our work reveals that CEOs and CMOs are interested in seeing marketing organizations improve their performance in two key areas: effectiveness (the ability to produce the desired result) and efficiency (reducing waste). Often times the question that remains is how much do we need to improve? One way to assess your organizationís performance and to understand what changes to make is through benchmarking. This two part article explores the value of benchmarking, identifies marketing capabilities and process that can be benchmarked, and outlines the five phases associated with a successful benchmarking initiative.

Benchmarking: A Best-Practice for Improving Marketing Performance – Part 2
The current economic environment makes marketing professionals’ ability to produce desired resultsóas efficiently as possibleótop-of-mind. Knowing what to improve and by how much is vital to establishing realistic performance targets and metrics. This two-part article discusses how to use benchmarking to assess your organization’s performance and to understand what changes to make. Part 1 defined benchmarking and explored its value. This second and final part identifies marketing capabilities and process that can be benchmarked and outlines the five phases associated with a successful benchmarking initiative.

Four Processes to Supercharge your Marketing Organization’s Performance
The demand from the executive team for increased accountability and effectiveness is more intense than ever. Anyone in todayís marketing organization who focuses on marketing performance and the rigorous assessment and measurement of marketing investments stands to thrive in todayís environment. Being able to demonstrate the impact of marketing on your company’s ability to achieve its business results is part of having the “right stuff.” For many marketing organizations implementing marketing performance management and measurement will require different and possibly even new processes. This session describes four processes any organization can deploy to supercharge marketing performance and the steps to implement these process to supercharge your marketing organization’s performance.

Four Errors Marketers Make When Measuring Performance
Measuring marketing performance is an essential part of maximizing marketing efforts. Understanding what you are doing wrong is the first step to making it better. This article highlights four critical mistakes many marketers face which can directly effect their bottom line. Make sure you are avoiding these common faux pas.

Bolster Revenue with Win/Loss Analysis
In today’s environment win/loss analysis is something any company can do to bolster revenue efforts; yet many companies fail to do this work. When done properly win/loss analysis provides clarity and insights into customersí perceptions of your product, experience throughout the sales cycle, and expectations created by your company messaging. Institutionalizing win/loss analysis will create requirements to product development, feedback about messaging to marketing, and may help uncover new sales strategies and initiatives. For win/loss analysis to be beneficial it needs to be done in a timely fashion with accuracy and objectivity.

Win/Loss Analysis – A Process for Taking Revenue Up a Notch
Win/loss analysis is something any company can do. Why companies forgo this important step is a mystery. It does take some effort, but when done properly win/loss analysis provides clarity and insights into customers’ perceptions of your product, experiences throughout the sales cycle, and expectations created by your company messaging. As a result, win/loss analysis plays a key role in bolstering revenue, which every company seeks regardless of the economic environment. In this article, we’ll examine the purpose, definition, and metric associated with win/loss analysis.

Managing Marketing Performance: The Role of Data, Analytics and Metrics
Performance management is the process of measuring progress toward achieving key outcomes and objectives in order to optimize individual, group, or organizational performance. A performance-driven marketing organization is one that has a set of measurable performance standards, a pointed focus on outcomes, and clear lines of accountability, all of which are important if a marketing organization wants to prove its value.

Win/Loss Analysis (Part 2): A Process for Taking Revenue Up a Notch
This is the second part of a two-part article about using win/loss analysis to bolster revenue. In the first article, we explained that win/loss analysis is something any company can do to gain clarity and insights into customers’ perceptions of its product, experience throughout the sales cycle, and expectations created by company messaging. This final part discusses getting started, questions to include in the discussion, when and how to conduct the analysis, and using the findings.

Tune Your Marketing Organization for Peak Performance

This economic and competitive environment makes metrics, performance management and knowledge sharing across the enterprise even more critical for every organization. This article highlights the disconnect between Marketing and the C-Suite perception of Marketing’s value and contribution, identifies five areas where with the CEOs leadership can transform into a performance-driven organization.

Using Marketing Metrics to Create a Competitive Advantage

In these challenging times, hesitation and missteps can be enough to push a company over the precipice. Many organizations are operating in a time when lost customers or poor decision making may be too costly to absorb. Shorter product development lifecycles, shorter launch times, increased regulations and more demanding customers, make metrics, performance management and knowledge sharing across the enterprise even more critical for every organization. This article explores which metrics companies need to drive performance to the next level.

Bridging the Gap: In Pursuit of Lead Management

Since marketing and sales share the responsibility of generating profitable revenue, it’s imperative the two groups operate as a well-synchronized team. But when these teams are misaligned, the demand generation engine is also misaligned. when this alignment isn’t fixed, marketing earns a reputation for generating bad leads, resulting in sales ceasing to process them altogether. This article covers three crucial components for keeping sales and marketing on the same page.

Getting the Biggest Bang for Your Social Media Buck

When it comes to social media there are two sides to consider about your company others are leading and the converations you are leading. This new frontier is vast and dynamic. This article covers what you should measure regarding the conversations taking place around you and how you can asses whether the social media initiatives you are investing in are working.

Four Customer-Centricity Best-Practices and Three-Customer-Value Metrics for Customer-Relationship Success
The current economic downturn and the barrage of media choices require a different relationship with customers, and a different way of monitoring that relationship. Changes in the way customers receive and process information via social-networking sites, mobile phones, and the Internet, combined with shrinking margins, deteriorating customer loyalty, and increased demand for marketing accountability, suggest the need for a new approach to customer-centricity. This article covers the importance of following three customer-value metrics and how to improve them: churn/attrition rate, customer retention equity and share of wallet. Improving the strength of the relationship with its customers, increasing the satisfaction across all touch points, and optimizing customer experiences will directly affect each of those three customer-value metrics.

Quality Marketing Metrics Enable Marketing’s Opportunity to Impact Strategic Direction
From the Association of National Advertisers, to Frost & Sullivan, to IDC, to the CMO Council, marketing accountability has been front and center at conferences and in articles. The reason is that CEOs are demanding more accountability from marketing. While most marketers are measuring something, survey results indicate there is room for improvement regarding metrics and the quality of these metrics.

Measuring the Value of Social Marketing and Media
While social marketing was originally developed from the desire companies had to capitalize on commercial marketing techniques, it has evolved into a more integrative and comprehensive discipline. Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information such as viral videos, blogs, online reviews, etc. help the company build its business. However, the metrics you choose for your social media will be determined after youíve established the business outcome that needs to be achieved and how the social media will support the corresponding marketing objective.

Setting Performance Targets: The Ins and Outs in 10 Steps
Setting performance targets is a critical component in developing an MPM framework and system and demonstrating Marketing accountability. This article outlines the 10 steps for establishing performance targets to drive performance improvement, initiate a discussion about priorities, define direction, bring focus, improve alignment, and facilitate faster course adjustments.

Marketing Audits Lead to Improved Marketing Performance
Is your marketing organization as effective as you would like it to be and achieving what you want? Are you Marketing accountability efforts working?  The purpose of the Marketing audit is to determine where the marketing function is excelling and where there might be opportunities for improvement. This article explores the value of a marketing audit, what an audit entails, what to audit, and three key steps for conducting a marketing audit.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: The CMO
The role of the Chief Marketing Officer has evolved since some of the first CMOs came on the scene in early 1990s. The CMO has moved from focusing primarily on brands and clever advertising to a larger, more strategic role designed to enable a company to meet the ever-changing needs of a diverse and global customer base. This article offers advice for CMO’s including six key skills all CMO’s must have, five ingredients and four essentials all CMO’s need to survive and thrive in today’s business climate.

Marketing Performance Excellence: What Sets Best-in-Class Marketers Apart
A number of recent studies including a study from Fournaise’s, as well as out 2011 MPM Study suggest that many CEO’s view marketers as lacking in business credibility. Given stiff competition over limited resources, marketing operations and performance management play a vital role in enabling the marketing organization to deliver on Marketing accountability, accelerate customer acquisition, and improve customer value.