MARKETING PRODUCTIVITY

The Path to Marketing Performance

It is no secret that marketing leaders and their organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their value to their businesses, especially in today’s environment. Although business concepts such as marketing effectiveness and marketing accountability are being hailed as the solution to this challenge, they share a common problem in they often seek to meet the objectives of the marketing organization in a short-term, siloed fashion rather than through an orchestrated, longer-term effort.

For example, marketing effectiveness initiatives usually focus on improving measurement while marketing accountability efforts typically center on results and answerability. The critical missing piece in both is the process by which one actually transforms a marketing organization from its current situation to a state of improved, sustainable marketing performance.

Becoming a marketing performance driven organization at its core requires a shift to becoming a continuous improvement, learning marketing organization. As with any organizational change it requires discipline and commitment, but with a structured approach and a little common sense this journey is achievable for any committed organization.

The Starting Point

The first step in the journey to becoming a marketing performance driven organization to is to develop a foundational understanding of how the organization is performing today as it relates to the expectations of marketing within the organization as well as best practices in marketing performance. This understanding can be achieved through a simple but comprehensive marketing performance assessment that evaluates current activities and performance improvement opportunities against the primary enablers of marketing performance; alignment, people, process, technology and data and metrics.

The top graphic provides a typical view of a marketing organization’s activities against these five enablers of marketing performance:

Assessing current marketing practices against all five enablers is a critical step in identifying opportunities for improvement in a learning-driven marketing organization. Only with the five dimensions working together in concert can an organization effectively begin to transform its data into meaningful insights, and then into actions that deliver better business results.

The following table provides a summary of each enabler’s assessment areas and why each is important to an organization’s overall marketing performance:



While a marketing performance assessment is a great diagnostic, its real value is the baseline understanding and insight it provides for developing an organization’s roadmap to improved marketing performance.

Marketing Performance Objectives

Every marketing organization, regardless of industry, market position or company size, has the opportunity to evolve their marketing team into a more performance-driven organization, but the benefits and ROI of improvements are likely to be unique to each company. With the knowledge of where your organization is currently performing, the next step is to establish the marketing performance goal(s) for the marketing organization. Establishing the right goals requires developing a comprehensive vision for the marketing organization’s evolution over the next 3-5 years, and the specific deliverables and benefits the organization hopes to achieve through these changes. The following exhibit illustrates our evolutionary view of the five marketing performance stages:



With a clear understanding of where the marketing organization is positioned today and a vision for where it wants to be in the future, a roadmap can be developed to guide the organization as it moves forward on its path to becoming a marketing performance-driven organization.

Moving Marketing Forward

The path to marketing performance can be a challenging endeavor. Achieving success is all about transformation change of the organization’s culture. Success requires discipline and commitment to viewing the marketing organization and its performance holistically against the five key marketing performance enablers. This holistic view treats the marketing performance enablers as integrated activities that support each other and marketing performance goals as a whole, rather as individual, siloed activities. This holistic, integrated view of marketing performance provides a framework for the marketing organization to begin identifying the minor and major milestones for performance improvement.

In formulating a performance-improvement roadmap, it is critical that an organization set the correct short-term milestones. The most effective way to approach these short-term milestones is to identify and prioritize a set of easy wins for the organization that will deliver tangible, meaningful results. These minor milestones ideally will utilize the mechanical side of the enablers (data and metrics, systems), the soft side of the enablers (people, process, alignment) and the degree of integration across the enablers. Most importantly, achieving success and delivering results on the initial milestones should provide the organizational momentum and personal buy in to attack the next set of milestones.

Establishing a foundational understanding of the marketing organization’s current position, creating a marketing performance roadmap and developing the initial organization momentum for change are the critical first steps on the path to becoming a marketing performance-driven organization.