4 Ways to Make Performance Management an Integral Part of Organizational Marketing Mandates
Marketing is a goal-driven endeavor that is powered by real-time campaign performance and tracking technologies. As a result marketing performance has risen to prominence as an important part of the marketing lifecycle. For most business leaders and entrepreneurs, however, marketing performance goes beyond simple measurement of ROI and revenues. Most marketing value lies in amorphous and largely immeasurable factors like customer relationships, market share, marketplace position and so on.
These are usually the results of heavy investments and extensive marketing programs because of which organization and marketing leaders emphasize strongly on team performance and accountability.
In other words, organizations have to go about the usual business or brand building, lead nurturing and generation, ensure they meet their sales targets and maintain customer satisfaction all the while ensuring that they achieve scalability and profit margins even as most marketing activities are carried out in-house.
Under these circumstances measuring marketing performance becomes an important requirement. It has been seen however that very few marketing organizations actually take the trouble to manage or undertake performance measurement. The numbers reveal there is certainly room for a lot of improvement: three quarters of surveyed marketing professionals believe organizational measure marketing performance is only somewhat effective. Another ten percent feel that it is completely ineffectual.
There are several ways in which this might be tackled:
1. Goal setting and metrics measurement
It is important to define the goal of each marketing program and the specific outcomes that need to be met. Failing this it is difficult to get a read on performance and outcome. Therefore at the outset, targets need to be set against which performance an outcome can be measured. This is also tied to creating metrics catalogues and creating metrics based on program outcome.
2. Coherence between investments and outcome
Business investments and business outcomes always need to be in alignment. This applies to all aspects of a marketing program from the technology being employed to any partner agencies that might need to come on board. Tangible investments, like technological procurements, have to be company and customer focused and scale with changing customer needs. On the other hand investing in personnel is an equally important consideration as all agency partners should be able to align their goals to yours.
3. Upskilling company personnel
The very nature of marketing is transforming at the moment with the rise of new disciplines and sub-categories within the domain. With the rising focus of technology in management, especially, the requirement of the hour is marketing professionals with hybrid sets of marketing skills. Whether they are fresh out of college or industry veterans, organizations need to invest in upskilling their personnel to keep up with changing times and retain their competitive edge in the field.
4. Data analysis and analytics
These days it is impossible to delineate effective policies without taking into full consideration factors like customer intent, number of unique visitors to the company website and so on. For this it is important to invest in analytic technologies that will help organizations gain definitive insights into campaign performance.
Keeping the following guidelines in mind will definitely set performance management initiatives in the right direction.
Learn practical, ready-to-implement ideas to optimize performance management for your enterprise marketing from experts Gabrielle Tao, VP of Product Management for Oracle Marketing Cloud and Mark Urquhart, Senior Sales Consultant for Oracle Marketing Cloud who will speak on ‘Monitoring and Analytics: Gain Insights Into Your Campaign Performance’ at the Modern Marketing Experience from April 26–28, 2016 in Las Vegas.
Join the thousands of people expected to attend Modern Marketing Experience North America April 26–28, 2016 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Personally engage and network with Modern Marketing leaders and industry icons to gain valuable insights. Evolve your methods by taking home best practices from practitioners and experts in session tracks featuring cross-channel orchestration, optimization and personalization, social and content marketing, mobile engagement, data and programmatic advertising, and marketing automation. Explore today’s proven strategies and tools that you can use to power digital marketing innovation and revenue generation tomorrow.
