In a recent Marketing Performance Management Survey, the results highlighted that there is still a gap on the importance executives put on utilizing marketing data to make key business decisions.
Some of the key findings…
- Just 40% of marketers say measuring Marketing’s value and contribution to the business is very important or critical.
- However, less than 10% of senior executives are relying on marketing data to make decisions.
At Clearhead we continue to see organizations mis-aligned on business goals and KPI’s. The stats above don’t surprise me because quite often executives don’t find value in the marketing data because marketers aren’t communicating results and making predictions that executives care about. As a marketer, its your job to ask “What are we trying to do as a business?” and “ What KPI’s support those goals?” Make it relevant and ask yourself, “Why should I (they) care?”
One of the most critical steps in the Clearhead Process is the “Align” phase. During this phase we help an organization clearly articulate and agree upon their business goals and KPI’s. In any optimization program if you don’t have clear KPI’s, measuring success will always be a challenge. Our align phase typically looks something like this:
- Discover: We understand your business.
- Synthesize: We build consensus on business goals & KPI’s.
- Hypothesize: We turn your ideas into hypotheses that can be validated.
- Prioritize: We help decide which hypotheses to validate first.
We always start with the creation and agreement of a measurement framework. From there, developing testable hypotheses is much easier.
If you are a marketer and feel like you don’t know which data or metrics your stakeholders care about, ask! The best thing to do is create your own measurement framework and use that as a discussion point with your stakeholders. The framework may be totally wrong, but its a good stake in the ground to start the dialogue. The key inputs to this framework should be Business Goals, KPI’s & Supporting Metrics.
