Resource
In all of our talk about data and analytics, it can be easy to lose sight of the importance of content. We’ve talked before about the importance of creating quality content, especially as the amount of content generated through social media, blogging and other platforms increases. In today’s world, 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared each day: make sure yours rises to the top and helps to increase your marketing ROI. Here’s how to ensure that marketing content positively impacts your ROI:
Personalize Content
Marketers have to fight against two main obstacles: the quantity of competing content and a lack of control over what information goes to potential customers. Brands no longer have as much control over their message. Nowadays, potential customers look towards online content, including reviews and tweets, to judge a brand. Moreover, the sheer amount of this content makes it difficult for a brand to craft a compelling message that sticks.
To ensure your marketing has meaningful reach and impact, it’s now necessary to personalize content and increase quality. 70% of customers surveyed say they get frustrated when content isn’t relevant to them, so use data and analytics to ensure that you’re delivering the right information to the right people.
Put Measures in Place to Evaluate Content Effectiveness
The impact of content can’t just be measured with one metric, since no one data point can tell you whether or not your content is effective. Instead, focus your content metrics in four main buckets: consumption, sharing, lead generation and sales. When determining how valuable your content is in proving your ROI, try answering the following questions:
- How many people have consumed your content, as measured in page views?
- How often do consumers share your content on social media?
- How often do these consumers turn into leads?
- How often do these leads turn into customers?
Once you have put a system in place to measure content, you can start to understand how to better personalize and target that content to improve these numbers. Use the data that you get from measuring these metrics to understand who is responding to your marketing and whether they’re your target audience. Once you have that initial data, start to further refine and personalize content to reach your target demographics.
Why Better Content Delivers Higher ROI
Creating consistently better content gives you more marketing predictability and a higher rate of return, driving more sales and allowing you to more easily show content’s contribution to your company’s bottom line. By basing your operations off of data, you create a trackable line of progress in your marketing that allows you to demonstrate your ROI to your C-Suite.
Let us know: how do you use content to help prove your ROI?
Photo Credit: Fabrice Florin via Flickr Creative Commons
Resource
Earlier this month, we wrote about the importance of using data to communicate marketing’s impact on ROI to colleagues and bosses outside the marketing department. Friday’s post focused on key performance indicators (KPIs) that are essential to the new marketing value chain. These are important benchmarks for your marketing efforts and your company. In this post, we’ll talk about other metrics that can help you validate your marketing efforts against your company’s overall goals and communicate your successes outside of the marketing department.
Revenue Per Lead
Revenue per lead is an indicator of overall marketing success. Like cost per lead metrics, this measurement looks at lead generation in relation to total client acquisition efforts. Calculating revenue per lead gives you a specific monetary value to align with marketing lead generation goals when explaining their importance to the rest of the company.
Traffic Sources
Where does your site traffic come from? Management will want to know what’s working in the marketing department. Show that you are making smart decisions about marketing spend by sharing your data on click-through rates for given campaigns and marketing programs. Then, show how you are making future marketing decisions based on this data.
Campaign-Specific Lead Generation
Along with traffic source metrics, you need to collect data on campaign-specific lead generation. This analysis takes traffic source data one step further and is more useful to the sales team. Some digital campaigns may lead to a high rate of click-throughs to your site, without many return visitors or conversions, while others may draw less overall interest but attract more relevant leads.
Time to Close
Marketing and sales need to work together to track this metric. The insights are worth it. Having a good idea of the “lifecycle” of a lead, from first contact to closed sale, generates important information for your business and can help you make marketing and budgeting decisions accordingly. From a marketing perspective, leads that were well nurtured will be warmer, and can also be quicker to close, which will allow you to later demonstrate the positive impact of your efforts.
These are just a few of the metrics you can use to communicate marketing efforts to the rest of your company. Educate your colleagues about how these numbers affect them. What other marketing metrics do you use when talking to people outside the marketing department?
Photo credit: StartupStockPhotos via Pixabay
Resource
With the emergence of the new marketing value chain comes the imperative to focus on new key performance indicators (KPIs). While mixing up your KPIs and becoming accountable for new metrics can be rattling for marketers who are used to a certain way of doing things, shifting your focus can make for smarter, more efficient marketing.
Here are four KPIs that are essential to keep track of as you shift your marketing efforts to focus on the new value chain.
Sales Revenue
As we discussed earlier this week, highlighting the relationship between sales and marketing is key to demonstrating your contribution to overall revenue. Using sales revenue as one of your KPIs also helps keep you on track with your company’s most important goals. Ensure that the sales revenue contributed by marketing exceeds the expenses that your marketing campaigns incur, and strive to continually maximize your return on investment.
Net Promoter Score
We’ve spoken before about the Net Promoter Score, which measures customer loyalty to your business. While loyalty is inextricably tied to purpose (and as we’ve talked about, purpose leads to higher profit) your company’s Net Promoter Score also can be used to predict customer retention and profit, as well as see how customers and other stakeholders are reacting to your marketing and your brand.
Marketing Qualified Leads : Sales Qualified Leads Ratio
How many of the new leads you generate are actually converting from marketing qualified leads (who are nurtured online with tactics like marketing automation) to sales qualified leads (who are ready for personal outreach from your sales team)? Know the ratio between the leads that move forward to become SQLs, and then track those leads to see if they actually turn into revenue to help improve your process for sending your sales team quality leads.
Site Traffic : Lead Ratio
Digital marketing is often focused on two goals: driving site traffic and generating leads. You’ll actually want to break this KPI down into four different metrics in order to get the best results: unique visits to your website, new lead conversions, site visits per conversion, and conversion by source. By doing so, you’ll uncover valuable data on the relationships between your web traffic, inbound leads and sales.
Data-driven marketing doesn’t just mean collecting data, but rather focusing on measuring what matters and gleaning insights that inform future marketing decisions. Make sure that all of your KPIs are supported by data and analytics, and know that you’ll need to stay accountable to that data in order to run a successful marketing department and prove your ROI.
Let us know: what KPIs do you find most useful for your marketing?
Photo Credit: Official GDC via Flickr Creative Commons
Resource
When you’re in a quarterly meeting with your CEO, it’s not the open rate on your latest email or the number of Twitter followers you’ve accrued that’s going to prove your value to the business. Instead, what really matters is your impact on revenue. Proving that your marketing operations have had a clear, positive impact on your company’s bottom line is essential to your success and that of your company.
Unfortunately, marketers often get left out of discussions of revenue. Instead of being seen as a major driver of the bottom line, marketers are pigeonholed as a creative department that doesn’t contribute in a measurable fashion to sales or revenue generation. Of course, this isn’t at all true. But in order to prove it, we need to embrace the new marketing value chain and focus on new ways of proving our worth. Here’s how:
Redefine the Marketing Cycle
Unlike many other departments, marketing’s impact on revenue can be difficult to measure. Determining the source of new leads, tracking them through to conversion, and attributing them to a specific source with an attached monetary value is complex. In order to truly measure marketing’s impact on revenue, we must concentrate on defining what matters most in the marketing cycle and show how marketing builds long-term value instead of short-term gains.
Measure the Impact of Marketing Activity on Revenue
The new marketing value chain is predicated on making tasks measurable and accountable to data. In order to ensure that your marketing activity is generating revenue, it’s necessary to invest in the tools and processes required for sophisticated marketing measurement. This may include things like a top-of-the-line CRM system or a marketing automation tool.
Essential to measuring the impact of marketing is coordinating with the sales department in order to track marketing-generated leads through the sales process all the way to conversion. Your goal should be the ability to track which of your marketing campaigns and activities are generating quality leads, how many those leads are being nurtured through marketing automation and the sales team, and how much revenue they’re bringing into the pipeline. Only then can you optimize your marketing investment and impact.
Forecast Revenue Contribution
To truly illustrate your impact on ROI, you should also work to forecast the continued effects of marketing on future revenue. While this is traditionally the domain of sales, the power to make correct, data-based revenue forecasts gives marketers a powerful tool for demonstrating their credibility.
Use data and analytics taken from ongoing and past marketing campaigns to forecast the effect of marketing on future revenue. By working through revenue contributions as discussed above, marketers can begin to understand the degree to which different strategies and tactics contribute to overall revenue. By tracking past and current marketing efforts and using the related insights to predict future revenue contribution, marketers can demonstrate their understanding of not just their present, but also their future role in the company’s bottom line.
Let us know: how are you tracking the impact of your marketing efforts on your company’s revenue?
Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
Resource
The new marketing value chain doesn’t just help marketing teams do their jobs — it helps entire companies succeed.
Since the fall, we’ve been blogging about the differences between the old and new marketing value chains, and why a transition to the new, data-driven marketing approach is crucial in today’s digital economy. But how does the new value chain actually impact business growth?
The old value chain emphasized a “rules and tools” approach, which was valuable in its time but has less relevance in the rapidly-changing marketing environment of the digital age.
In contrast, the new value chain relies on three links: data-driven insight, truly quantifiable strategy, and application of creative and technology. Data-driven insights allow marketers to tailor the process and approach of their marketing efforts. Strategy, creative and technology then come together to create engaging, fresh appeals to the target audience.
The New Marketing Value Chain Grows Existing Business
The benefits of a focus on data and insights extends far beyond the marketing department. Marketing data can help whole businesses better understand their customers’ preferences, and build products and services to fit their needs.
The three-pronged approach of the new value chain can also help organizations learn about their customers’ values. Appreciating these values can aid in the construction of a statement of purpose, and help an organization refocus their efforts on what matters most to their target stakeholders.
The New Marketing Value Chain Creates New Opportunities
Data-driven marketing insights can also reveal new, previously untapped business opportunities.
When your company’s approach to data and insights focuses on truly listening to the needs of customers and leads, new ideas for improving your product or service will come more naturally. For some, this may take the form of a new product, refined customer service or a new way of looking at an old problem. How you use these data-driven ideas is up to you.
Read our blog this Wednesday to explore examples of how the new value chain has been used to improve revenue flow. Then, on Friday, come back to learn about the new value chain KPIs savvy marketers should focus on.
Resource
The job of the CMO is changing rapidly. As our Managing Partner Bob Murphy said in his MarketingProfs article, “How CMOs can Prove Their ROI in the C-Suite,” top-level marketers juggle multiple tasks, including navigating the digital sphere, satisfying company stakeholders and contributing to sales. Some have risen to these new challenges, while others have been crushed by them.
What’s the difference between today’s successful CMOs and those who can’t keep up? It’s data. For a long time, data and digital tools have had a track record of helping CMOs not just prove their worth, but prove it relative to others in their field–and now it’s imperative that CMOs take advantage of those tools to stay afloat. Today, let’s discuss how to stay savvy in the face of new challenges.
Here are a few ideas:
Oversee a diverse staff with diverse resources
While most marketers today understand how important digital media is to marketing success, the skills needed to stay savvy in digital are constantly becoming more demanding. Today, two-thirds of CMOs report that they’re not ready to cope with social media. Why are they falling behind?
To be successful in the digital sphere (and everywhere else), high-level marketers need to be able to identify the tools and resources that allow them to operate on new platforms. In terms of social media, a CMO needs to understand that they’ll need the efforts of a copywriter with social media experience, a data analyst who can crunch the numbers that come from their Twitter and Facebook activity, and a mid-level manager to develop a distinct social media strategy and oversee its execution. Moreover, they’ll need the tools to manage this execution. Whether that’s Hootsuite to organize activity or Google Analytics to analyze data, marketers need to stay equipped with the tools that allow them to understand the effects of their efforts.
Align operations with data and metrics
82% of CMOs say they’re unprepared to structure operations around big data. However, the ones who do use these new tools report higher financial returns and better customer relationships. Why is this?
As you may guess, it’s because of the new marketing value chain. By structuring operations around the insights that data provides, CMOs can oversee more efficient, agile teams that understand how to adapt their operations to data-based insights and develop more targeted, meaningful marketing campaigns.
Keep learning
Marketing tools, technologies and approaches have changed a lot in recent years, and they’re sure to keep on changing. If you want to stay savvy, you have to make continued, self-directed education a priority. It’s as simple as that.
Let us know: how are you staying savvy in the face of new marketing platforms and opportunities?
Photo credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
Resource
From business development to sales, all kinds of employees in all kinds of departments are relying on data to define their ROI. We predicted in our white paper on the new marketing value chain that data would become central to marketing operations, but it’s become more than that: data is now a universal way to structure operations.
By operating in line with the new marketing value chain, marketers are able to establish a common vocabulary with other departments, demonstrate the scope and predicted outcomes of marketing operations, and clearly communicate their ROI.
Use data to communicate your ROI
Communicating ROI begins with one of three efforts: understanding where every marketing dollar is being spent, making sure that spend aligns with company priorities, and then communicating results to the C-Suite in a way that explains your contribution to the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to them.
That spend should include direct monetary investments, such as advertising buys, and time costs, which can be figured based on the gross cost of your team and the time it takes the team to see a specific marketing activity through to completion.
Marketers should rely on language of data to prove their ROI outside of their department. The C-Suite expects reports that measure the quantifiable result of marketing efforts, so marketers need to take advantage of analytics to track the progress and results of what they’re doing.
In your marketing operations, keep in mind how everything you do relates to the KPIs that matter most to the C-Suite. By keeping track of costs accrued and value won, you’ll be able to prove the positive impact of marketing on the whole business.
Communicate your continued growth
The new marketing value chain isn’t just about reporting what you’ve already done. It’s also about having the flexibility in your marketing operations to adjust based on new information, market climate and past results. If you are able to demonstrate in concrete, data-based terms how both your tried-and-true strategies and your agility positively affect your ROI, you’re in a great position.
Moreover, it’s important to be able to analyze current marketing efforts and predict future outcomes. Demonstrating that you have a clear understanding of the impact of your campaigns before they take place is a crucial indicator that your marketing is efficient and trustworthy. Make sure that you can break down these future outcomes into the key performance indicators that matter most to the business: when you deliver on them, the C-Suite will see that you have the ability to accurately predict your future performance. What’s more valuable than that?
Let us know: how has aligning your marketing efforts with data and analytics helped you prove your value in your company?
Photo credit: TEL SIP via Google Images
Resource
Marketing ROI can be difficult to understand and even more difficult to track, but the best way to prove your worth is through easily communicable data. Too often, marketing is viewed as an isolated department, separate from sales, operations and other key actors, and as a result many key business leaders don’t understand how marketing impacts their work. It’s time for marketers to educate the rest of the company and illustrate the positive impact that smart marketing can make.
Here’s how to do both:
Illustrating marketing ROI through data insights
Digital marketing is data-driven. Document your department’s use of the New Marketing Value Chain to show how marketing decisions are made. Then, use analytics programs to collect data on your marketing’s effectiveness, and use charts and graphics to visually communicate how leads become sales.
Use the various analytics tools at your disposal to dig into the key performance indicators your bosses want to see, including the cost to acquire each lead and customer. Also use data to explain to non-marketers how each aspect of your inbound and outbound strategy contributes to lead acquisition and nurturing.
Communicating marketing ROI to the whole team
Internal communication is crucial to many aspects of a business, including building strong company culture and instilling a sense of purpose in employees. It is also key to helping the rest of your company understand the importance of marketing, especially modern marketing tools that are relatively new to the industry and more technical in nature.
Educate your peers and the decision-makers in your organization about the impact marketing efforts have on them, and how you deploy marketing strategies to yield results. The growth of your business relies on smart marketing decisions and investments. It also relies on common perceptions of marketing effectiveness.
When you have opportunities to speak or write about your work for those you work with, emphasize both marketing data and process. The numbers illustrate concrete marketing effectiveness, while the description of marketing process allows non-marketers to see the importance of each step in the New Marketing Value Chain and how it feeds positive ROI.
How do you communicate marketing ROI and importance in your organization? How can you improve?
Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
Resource
In 1923, Claude Hopkins argued that there are rules of advertising that, as long as they were understood and followed, would make success both attainable and repeatable. By combining marketing best practices with conventional wisdom and applying that knowledge across the best tools and channels, he said, marketers could provide predictable success.
Today, too often we think of the “best” marketers as the ones who have the best mastery of these rules and tools. Many companies focus on developing mastery of marketing tools like CRM integration or social media among their marketing professionals. The more you know about these tools–and the more you’re able to use them in conjunction with conventional marketing wisdom–the more successful you’ll be. At least that’s how the thinking goes.
We’ve talked before about how this old marketing value chain has severe limitations for today’s business operations, but it also places limitations on how marketers can demonstrate their return on investment (ROI.) “Rules and tools”-based operations fail to set marketers up with the data and strategy that allow them to prove their worth to the rest of the team. Today, we’ll discuss how marketers are doing themselves and their careers a disservice by not operating around data and analytics.
The Problem with Marketing Rules
Traditional marketing wisdom stays around for a reason: what worked for David Ogilvy in the 1960s makes sense. And it’s easy, at least relative to the new data-driven approach that is coming to the forefront. Playing on common sense, traditional wisdom and the personalities of marketing thought leaders, the codifying of marketing best practices stifles creativity and innovative thinking within the field.
However, data can break these boundaries and provide marketers with the analytics to back up their work by demonstrating real results. By targeting audiences and messaging and relying on the data you receive during your campaigns guide your future marketing strategy, you can break free of stale marketing rules. Data-based operations allow for greater flexibility and tactical adaptation, and help you to bolster your measurable ROI. Even if your tactics go against traditional marketing rules, those positive results don’t lie.
The Problem with Marketing Tools
Whether it’s leveraging a social media platform or investing in a new marketing CRM, tools help a marketer do their job better. However, many companies think that simply having and using these tools will result in success. Not so. In order to maximize the impact of any marketing tool, it’s essential to use data to guide your strategy. For example, a company Twitter account that occasionally tweets a cat picture or a #ThrowbackThursday may be using a tool and taking heed of traditional rules, but it’s not going to go very far.
By contrast, a company that uses data from a network like Twitter to look at the trends their followers are responding to, the topics thought leaders are discussing, and the conversations about needs related to their industry is likely to see meaningful results from the time spent on Twitter. A marketer who combines data-based operations with the smart use of marketing tools is going to have a clear, demonstrable impact that they can bring to the C-Suite to prove their ROI.
Let us know: how do you use data to prove your ROI as a marketer?
Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
Resource
As you’re probably aware, marketing is constantly evolving. With each evolution, marketing becomes a deeper and more meaningful facet of business and life. Two of the most important components of this current evolution include data and purpose, and the two work to strengthen each other. The new marketing value chain’s focus on data and insights can help us build and track clear objectives for purpose, which in turn makes doing good achievable and measurable.
Why the New Marketing Value Chain Improves Purpose
As a quick refresher, the new marketing value chain proposed by Movéo in 2014 takes the place of the old “rules and tools” marketing value chain that was unadaptable and inflexible to changing market conditions. The new marketing value chain is based in three main points:
- Data is used to create strategy predicated on insight;
- Marketing is conducted in a three-pronged approach using insight, strategy and application to address marketing issues;
- Constant adaptation is required to maintain flexibility to new market circumstances.
This approach allows marketers to gain a deeper understanding of why their marketing works, not just how it works.
Because the new marketing value chain is focused on finding out why marketing works, it naturally allows for a deeper understanding of marketing’s impact. The data and analytics on which this value chain relies allows marketers to understand how their efforts affect the world around them, and with this insight can better improve their positive impact.
Why Purpose Improves the New Marketing Value Chain
The new marketing value chain forces marketers to quantify a business purpose and break it down into specific, measurable data points. By doing this, marketers are able to measure their impact in specific, quantifiable ways. This allows marketers to understand their influence and adapt operations to maximize their impact.
Marketers, let us know: how do you see your purpose and your data-based operations impacting each other?
Photo Credit: Highways Agency via Flickr Creative Commons
