Is your marketing effectiveness program built to last? 5 questions you need to ask

Developing a best-in-class marketing effectiveness program requires time, effort, and commitment – but the rewards are worth it.

To succeed, businesses need a holistic set of processes, tools, techniques, skills, and behaviors that enable marketers to make investments that contribute to business growth. These include:

• A clear vision for the role that marketing plays in driving business growth
• A robust yet agile data strategy
• A range of analytic techniques that measure the full impact of marketing over the short and long term.
• Data-driven foresight techniques that enable you to plan for multiple future scenarios.
• A culture of data-informed decision-making throughout the business.

Excelling across all these different areas can be transformative, according to research. Companies that demonstrate advanced marketing effectiveness capabilities are much more likely to see year-over-year revenue growth.

But it’s important that you don’t take a “set and forget” approach to your marketing effectiveness program. To ensure it delivers over the long term, you need to assess it regularly and ensure it evolves as the business, category, and wider economy changes.

A good way to do this is to ask the following five questions and, where appropriate, take the recommended actions.

1. Does the program meet the specific requirements and objectives made at the outset?
The goal of your marketing effectiveness program should be ambitious – not something that can be achieved in a few weeks or months – ladder up to the overall growth goal of your business and be supported by clear KPIs. Getting all relevant stakeholders – think everyone from your finance department to external agency partners – to understand and agree on what you’re trying to achieve is a key part of ensuring your program succeeds.

• Actions: Conduct stakeholder interviews to build trust and factor in their needs and requirements where relevant. Create a roadmap that clearly articulates how your program is going to achieve the goal you have set. Socialize this roadmap with your stakeholders and keep them updated on progress.

2&3. Are the insights you have unearthed of a high enough quality? Is it clear what actions should be taken to drive growth?
“So often, we see insights that are just data points rather than actual insights. You really have to keep getting into the ‘but why?’” So said Phoebe Barter, Group Brand Director at UK-based insurance company Aviva, at a roundtable event in Cannes this year.

I couldn’t agree more. But once you have generated quality insights, you also need to work out what concrete actions should be taken and clearly articulate this to the people who are going to carry them out.

• Actions: Ascertain how many insights are leading to actions and whether marketing activity is changing as a consequence. Then, evaluate whether this is because of a lack of data, low value insights, or barriers such as change or complexity. Using data-informed foresight techniques such as scenario planning and war gaming to analyze how the market and economy is likely to change and what you should do as a consequence is a good way to demonstrate you have an understanding of drivers outside of marketing.

4. Have you democratised insights and do the relevant teams know how and when to use them to make decisions that can drive growth?
Having a culture in your marketing organization that champions data-informed decision-making is a goal that all companies should aim for. But we know this remains a challenge – 40% of marketers are not making investment decisions that are supported by data or insights.

Improving this statistic will give you the confidence to make better decisions and will also help to build the trust with the c-suite, particularly finance, that marketing is making the right calls that contribute to growth.

• Actions: Work with your People and Culture teams to develop a training program that provides marketers with the skills and processes they need to understand and use data-informed insights in decision-making. Next, incentivise, reward, and evaluate employees to use data in their work. Crucially, all these elements need to be built into ways of working so they happen on an ongoing basis.

5: Do you have a mechanism in place to continually track decisions that are made and the value that they generate for the business?
You’ll know you’re succeeding when the business commits to investing in marketing to drive growth and the c-suite discusses how marketing effectiveness tools have helped to improve ROI during earnings calls, as Diageo’s CFO has done.

Successes like this can only be achieved when you are able to demonstrate that value has been generated from the decisions you’ve made. In organizations where there is limited awareness of marketing effectiveness, finding vocal supporters who will champion the impact you have made will help to improve visibility and build credibility.

• Actions: Internal scorecards that track business improvement should be appended or annotated with the background on the source of each initiative and what data or insights led to marketing decisions and changes. Share successes regularly and as widely as possible. Identify and nurture stakeholders who actively support your work with the wider business.

Asking these five questions and taking relevant actions will go a long way to ensuring you deliver effective marketing that drives business growth over the long term.

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