Ramp Marketing Effectiveness

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than non-agile companies. Articles in Forbes Magazine emphasize that the acceleration of changes in customer preferences, the market landscape, and technology coupled with the explosion of data requires marketing organizations to be more agile. Agile marketing organizations are more effective marketing organizations.  They are able to adapt their marketing efforts, quickly and successfully, in response to changing customer behavior, market conditions and business direction, to the benefit of improved market share or customer value. 

Marketing effectiveness, marketing accountability, and marketing measurement are three complementary, distinct performance management concepts.  Marketing accountability reflects marketing’s ability to explain the basis for its actions and by its very nature implies both a measurement and computational aspect and covers a range of marketing capabilities, processes, and metrics. Marketing effectiveness measures marketing’s ability to produce a specific result. 

This increase focus on agility and effectiveness affords Marketing Operations the opportunity to play a central role in improving Marketing’s ability to deliver on performance measurement and management, and enables Marketing to operate as a Center of Excellence. Achieving agility, cultivating marketing effectiveness and driving performance improvements requires a number of proficiencies, including data, analytical, measurement, skills, processes, and technological muscle. 

Hone Data, Analytical, and Performance Measurement Skills 

Highly functional marketing organizations leverage distinctive capabilities and processes to improve efficiencies and effectiveness. Firms with highly functional marketing organizations experience more innovation, market share growth and profit.  Marketing’s value is derived from its ability to develop knowledge and skills that define market opportunities and design and implement the strategy that connects customers with products. 

Our work and that of others have found best-in-class marketing organizations develop knowledge, skills and processes and deploy systems and tools related to managing and enhancing the connection between customers, products and service delivery.  Whether you are just starting your performance management journey or are well on your way, you can learn from those who excel in their pursuit of excellence.  Even the best athletes and performers train and employ coaches. 

Optimize Your Performance Management Processes and Marketing Operations 

Marketing Operations is the infrastructure, the mechanism and the engine that helps Marketing be more agile and generate more value for the business. It develops and implements the processes, systems, tools and skills necessary for marketing to drive business results, to use data to make strategic decisions related to customers, the market and products, to make course corrections, and to measure and report on marketing performance. Marketing operational excellence is the engine for the Marketing function.  It serves as a conduit between Marketing, Sales, Finance and the executive team. It facilitates and orchestrates the work of marketing--running marketing like a business is at the heart of marketing operations. 

We have identified 27 distinct operations comprise the marketing workflow.  These 27 workflow operations are grouped into five key marketing areas:  strategic marketing (pre-sale), product marketing/go-to-market, opportunity development, post sale/customer marketing, and marketing performance management (marketing operations). 

Power-Up With Technology  

Tools can facilitate positive benefits such as process efficiencies, better and faster decisions, consistent workflows, enhanced connectivity and sharing, and so on.  

In their study, “Realizing the Promise of Marketing Technology” ITSMA defined marketing technology as “the software for improving marketing and sales processes to achieve business objectives.” This definition provides a way to frame the marketing technology landscape, which currently consists of a very large and growing number of players and platforms.  The options and platforms often include systems for managing digital assets, allocating resources, tracking marketing activity and expenditures, automating campaigns (online and offline), managing content, demand, and customer relationships and measuring and reporting marketing performance. 

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the options. The purpose of marketing technology is to facilitate process efficiencies, better and faster decisions, consistent workflows, enhanced connectivity, alignment, collaboration, and investment management. At VisionEdge Marketing we organize marketing technology into four broad categories: 

The right tools in the right hands enables you to find customers, keep customers, and grow the value of customers.