How to decide if you should get a marketing performance management platform

A marketing performance management (MPM) platform employs statistical modeling and machine learning to holistically evaluate the performance of a company’s marketing initiatives on bottom-line impact. It helps marketers allocate future spend and bring it in line with business goals.

Read next: What is marketing performance management and how can it help you?

Committing to and implementing an MPM platform has implications for every aspect of your marketing operations and business as a whole. To evaluate the suitability of an MPM for your organization, do a comprehensive assessment of business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources. Considering the following questions:

1. How would we use a marketing performance management platform? What are the first problems that we would use it to solve?
2. How do we currently manage our marketing campaigns? How many and what martech and adtech systems are employed in executing campaigns? Is one the “master” or dominant system?
3. Are they tied together in any way? How many and what channels do we typically deploy campaigns on? Depending on the complexity of your campaigns and the length of the typical purchase cycle you’re measuring, you may not need the advanced capabilities offered by a dedicated marketing performance management solution.
4. How do we currently analyze success? Is there a central analytics solution? How flexible is the system? Are we able to arrive at insights that are actionable?
5. How do we currently determine how much budget is allocated to marketing and how that spend is distributed internally and through media expenditures?
6. Is your organization ready for a marketing performance management platform and ready to act on the insights gained by such a system? Do you have the staffing to use the tool to its full capacity or would you need to hire data analysts or train existing employees? Looking at your marketing spend in a more holistic way and allocating it accordingly may not be compatible with a department divided into media-specific silos. It may be necessary to dramatically reconfigure how staff resources are deployed, possibly resulting in a need to eliminate positions or provide training.
7. How will we define and benchmark the success of a marketing performance management system? One challenge with this type of system is that it requires the commitment of resources that might otherwise be applied to campaign management martech or ad tech. Though research suggests this is likely to pay off, it’s important to determine how you’ll gauge success.
8. Do we have management buy-in? You’ll be much more successful if the C-suite advocates for rolling MPM out across the company.
9. What is the total cost of ownership? Be sure to consider things like adding staff, training existing staff and development costs for integration.

MPMs’ capabilities make them very attractive to marketers. However, their expense and the additional resources needed to operate them must be weighed carefully when considering one. You also must to assess whether your organization needs everything an MPM platform can do. If it doesn’t, look for less expensive solutions to add to your existing stack. Finally, is your company capable of getting the most out of such a system? Do you have the staff and organizational alignment this will take?

Download the MarTech Intelligence Report: Enterprise Marketing Performance Management Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide