Marketing with Smart ROI by Stephen Rogers
Marketing with smart ROI by Stephen RogersIs marketing one of the last bastions of unregulated expenditure within a business? There is growing pressure from the Boardroom and Executive Management Committee’s to bring marketing and communications expenditure to heal. However, this is more fundamental than simply requiring the Marketing Director to take an obedience class. It’s not just about control, but increasingly performance, measurement and extracting a true understanding of the genuine return on investment that marketing and individual marketing campaigns are bringing to the business.Too long perhaps has the Industry been hiding behind the excuse that marketing is a complex function, with multi-dimensional facets that embrace social, behavioural and emotional attributes whose very subjectivity tends to mean that they can only be assessed by qualitative assessment and not by any more stringent quantitative cost benefit modelling.There are a plethora of quotes which more often than not are used by senior executives when talking about or even to their Corporate Communications or Marketing Directors… ‘I know half of my marketing expenditure is working. I’m just not sure which half that is… One conclusion might be that this is just a sort term macro-economic driven response. When times are hard, budget pressures increase and expenditure levels are subject to greater scrutiny. It has always been so…and it will all be forgotten once the good times start to flow again…but will it?Perhaps not. True CFO’s maybe using the current macro-economic situation as a stalking horse, but this simply reflects their long held belief that marketing needs to be subjected to the same financial rigours as the rest of the business. So be prepared. Be very prepared. So is there cause for communications consternation or marketing mayhem… amongst the marketing departments up and down the land? Not necessarily. Firstly though it’s important to recognise and accept the fact that this is and will continue to be a reality of business life. Secondly, to plan for it and to pre-emptively prepare for it. This will help to ensure that the initiative still rests within the marketing function and not elsewhere within the organisation. There are three steps that need to be taken to help move marketing into the realms of business metrics normality:- Accountability- Measurability- Return On Investment. Individual businesses might well have addressed some of these elements, but very few have done so as a single end to end process.The first step like many things the hardest. But critically having done it once, it gets easier – because once a base line has been established a reference point exists against which all future analysis can be benchmarked.In addition it’s worth remembering is that the process is an iterative one and can and should be evolved and developed campaign on campaign, and year on year. AccountabilityThis is already well established within most organisations marketing departments, in terms of business
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