Measurement Insights
Get Your Organization Ready for Enterprise Marketing Return
One of the most common mistakes we see when it comes to marketing measurement is an over-reliance on technology to solve problems. Far too many marketers look to a given tool, technology or platform to unlock value without first appreciating the many other elements that must be in place in order to drive value.
Gartner’s 2018-2019 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing technology accounted for a full 29% of total marketing expense budgets. This is more than is spent on any other resource including talent, paid media or outside agencies.
Without the right strategy, process and methodology for growth, platforms, data and technology can only get us so far. Sometimes, they even make it worse by cluttering our workstream with confusing and conflicting data and processes.
Making EMR Real: We recently helped a large gifts and card retail client rethink their digital measurement, data and technology strategy. In our first phase we provided 11 core recommendations, six of which focused on data organization, KPI’s and process changes. None of them required investment in outside tools or data.
Common Challenges and How to Address Them
Successful marketing ultimately comes down to making better decisions. Doing so requires having the right people, trained, organized and incentivized in a way that maximizes enterprise value.
The following outlines a few of the common challenges we have seen when working through this with clients and our recommendations on how to handle each.
Mindset and Experience
Challenge: Team members are focused on maximizing their channel’s budget, rather than thinking through the overall budget and what role their channel plays in driving the overall strategy. These team members typically have deep channel expertise and limited visibility into the dynamics and capabilities of other channels.
Recommendation: Require channel teams to engage with each other on a regular basis so they understand how the value drivers within their channel are interconnected among channels. Leadership should be proactively scheduling cross-channel budget conversations to bring the team together to think through where every incremental dollar is best spent. Align as a group on what you are trying to drive forward as not all revenue is created equal. Are you trying to drive higher AOV? Are you trying to acquire new customers? Understanding which marketing and selling channels work best for which tactics will help this group align on where to spend that next dollar.
Organizational Structure
Challenge: Marketing teams are still siloed, and as such, fundamental barriers exist between business units. The digital marketing team sits within the e-commerce unit of the organization, and they may interact rarely, if at all, with the traditional marketing team. The digital team is focused on driving digital results, which creates the challenge of communicating value to the rest of the organization.
Recommendation: Break down the physical and metaphorical walls between traditional and digital. Marketers need to think holistically about how their message is reaching consumers, regardless of the medium. Everyone across the organization should be organized around driving enterprise value. Further delineation can be made against consumer goals such as acquisition and retention.
Organizational Incentives
Challenge: One of the main reasons why it is challenging to drive change is that teams are still financially incentivized on channel results — a typical example being a digital team incented solely or primarily on e-commerce sales. This obviously creates hurdles in enterprise adoption.
Recommendation: There should be a strong emphasis on evaluating how a specific channel or area of focus drove overall business value. Leadership should be goaled against enterprise value as well so that mindset trickles down throughout the organization.
We’ve helped dozens of clients improve their ability to measure and optimize against a broader view of enterprise value, no matter the level of organizational maturity. Every brand is at different stages – what matters is figuring out where you are and how to keep the momentum going.
Ovative is a digital-first media and measurement firm seeking to transform the measure of marketing success. At Ovative, we help brands move the needle. We are curious. We value your brand. We want to see you succeed. Connect with us to learn more!
