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How marketers can measure success

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How marketers can measure success

Marketing can show the relationship between a definite input and output, provided marketers are willing to measure their work. That is the case being made by Michael Brenner, CEO and founder of the Marketing Insider Group, an agency that specializes in content marketing. 

Just remember that what you are measuring is not how often you repeat a static message. That might tell you how many eyeballs saw the message, but not how many people were converted from prospects to customers. If marketing is going to demonstrably contribute to the bottom line, it must show how its work connects clicks with dollars.

Which bottom line matters?

Business measures its life by quarterly returns, preferably higher than the same quarter a year ago. How can marketing align with that?

Brenner touches on that topic in his blog post “How to Solve the Challenge of Marketing ROI.” Marketers cannot hide behind the excuse that only half their budgetary spend is effective without knowing which half. “Solving the challenge of Marketing ROI does not have to be rocket science. The first step is simply committing to measuring it,” Brenner wrote.

The most basic measure is what Brenner calls “simple ROI”: Measure the revenue generated from marketing activities, minus the investment made to generate that revenue, and divide by the investment. “[W]hat’s interesting about this simple calculation, is that investment shows up twice. This means that for most organizations, all you have to do is get more results from the same budget. Or get the same results with less budget,” he wrote.

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“This involves making trade-off calculations. And it means canceling programs that don’t produce a measurable return,” Brenner wrote. “If you can’t measure the return on marketing activities, simply stop investing in them. This is why content marketing is so effective. With a relatively low cost (compared to advertising) and a high measurability factor, showing the ROI of content marketing is just simple math.” 

“The digital platform that every company sits on with its web site is generating traffic, leads or revenue,” Brenner said. “If you’re a B2B company, it’s going to be leads for sales. If you are an e-commerce company, it’s going to be revenue,” Brenner said. The traffic coming to those web sites is organic, not paid. “The leads that come in through organic traffic convert at a higher rate. The e-commerce traffic that comes in through organic traffic converts at a higher rate,” he said. If your search result takes you to a company web site, you are more likely to buy that item than you would if you simply got a search result, he added. 

“Start with the simple measures. What was my inbound organic web site traffic, leads and e-commerce revenue last year and is it better this year?  What was it last quarter and is it better this quarter? We measure it every single month for our clients. I am shocked by how many CMOs we surprised with the insight that their traffic is down, their rankings on Google are down or their visibility in search is down relative to their competition,” Brenner said.  “It directly correlates to financial value. It’s something the CFO could understand, and yet too few marketers are measuring it and implementing programs that drive it.”  

Action vs. presence

In short, the promotion is about action, while content marketing is about  presence. That is something that can be measured and built to grow over time. 

“The campaign mentality is that you spend 75% of your budget on a big idea and the remaining 25% to get it out into the world, and then you say ‘Hmmm, did it work?’  You just spent all your budget. The campaign mentality, the one-off big idea, if it works, you got lucky, because you didn’t have any time to measure it,” Brenner explained. 

“When you are always on…creating content, or engaging with your customers or building audience on your web site and maximizing the conversion of your leads, you are learning what is working and what is not working,” Brenner said. This can be measured, which aids in CMO accountability, and the discernment to stop doing what does not work. “This is not rocket science.”

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Brenner spoke of several clients whose campaigns he audited. He found that 56% of their marketing campaigns they created to generate leads or revenue produced zero value. “My call to action for CMOs and marketers is to relentlessly cut the things that didn’t work or don’t work and learn from those mistakes, so that at least you are improving off a relatively low base.”

He continued: “You don’t need more budget. You just take budget away from underperforming programs and campaigns and reallocate to the thing that works. If it works, why would a company stop doing it?” 

So, create those simple measures. Show the increase in value. Show the decrease in costs. “That’s what CEOs do. That’s what CFOs do. CMOs think they should not, hiding behind the guise of creativity or lack of measurability, and it is not true in the digital world we live in,” he said.

Tactics and strategy

One of the sad truths of business is that responsibility without authority will yield failure. For the accountable CMO to succeed, he must have the authority to craft and execute his plan.

 “The analogy is ‘you can’t tell me to bake a cake, then also tell me how to bake it.’…Or you can’t say you want  a chocolate cake, then make the ingredients I can use  applesauce and peanut butter.” Brenner said. The baker, once tasked with baking the cake, will bake the best cake he can.

This illustrates the relationship between strategy and tactics. “Strategy is alignment to the business goal. Tactics is the way that you get there.” Brenner said. 

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“The CEO and CMO must measure things the same way, or at least define the proxies to the same thing. CEOs are accountable for revenue and profit and shareholder value. They understand they need happy customers and happy employees to get there. The CMO should be aligned on those exact same things.”

What marketers can do

Brenner breaks it down to four things a marketer can do: Show ROI, define what is measurable, cut waste, and tell the story.

Measurability need not be as direct as click-to-cash. “Marketers may not be able to show all the revenue they brought in, but they can show the revenue they touched and influenced,” Brenner said. “It’s not a revenue number, but it’s getting closer.” Here marketers can use multi-touch attribution modeling. It does not matter which type one selects, so long as it provides measurement over time. “Measuring relative value over time shows ROI.” he said.

“Marketers have to cut waste,” Brenner continued. “The budgets marketers get can’t be seen as a blank check or a testing ground of creative ideas…There has to be a reckoning, a death of the things that did not work.” 

“Marketing leaders need to learn how to be storytellers, to demonstrate and present the business value of marketing. It’s a skill too few marketers take on, practice and implement,” Brenner added. If the marketer has ROI to show but fails to tell the other units of the company, his budget will be cut and he will be reduced to being an order taker.

“Marketers should create a business plan for their budget, create market outlooks and SWOT analysis (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat), the P&L, the reason for the budget ask, the tactics they will employ and the measures they will use to show the results,” Brenner said. “That’s a simple business plan outline.”

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About The Author

Getting back to basics Marketing ROI
William Terdoslavich is a freelance writer with a long background covering information technology. Prior to writing for Martech, he also covered digital marketing for DMN. A seasoned generalist, William covered employment in the IT industry for Insights.Dice.com, big data for Information Week, and software-as-a-service for SaaSintheEnterprise.com. He also worked as a features editor for Mobile Computing and Communication, as well as feature section editor for CRN, where he had to deal with 20 to 30 different tech topics over the course of an editorial year. Ironically, it is the human factor that draws William into writing about technology. No matter how much people try to organize and control information, it never quite works out the way they want to.


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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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MARKETING

More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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