Produce profitable results
How to Improve Marketing ROI and Produce Profitable Results for your Company.
You may be the most creative marketer this side of town, but if you cannot deliver results to the bottom line, both you and your company will fail. It’s as simple as that.
Marketing leaders must concentrate their limited resources where they best serve customer needs and deliver value.
Data-driven discipline
No other department – other than IT – has changed so dramatically over the last decade than marketing. New strategies and solutions are constantly evolving, making common practices obsolete. To glean insight on what distinguishes a high-performing marketing organization from the mediocre, a comprehensive research study was conducted with over 10,000 marketers in 92 countries. Not surprisingly, those sophisticated in their use of data grew faster as well having a purposeful brand plus investment in marketing infrastructure. These companies also outperformed competitors in many KPIs including employee satisfaction, market share, net promoter score, and customer engagement. Heck, even the major league sports teams are living and dying by data analytics in their attempts to win championships!
A picture tells a thousand words, but data puts stories to action.
It is quite astonishing to witness the proliferation of marketing technology. The MarTech market has exploded from just 150 products in 2011 to well over 8,000 solutions today and is worth an estimated $50 billion. Gartner correctly predicted that CMOs would spend more on IT than CIOs! For marketers, this investment and focus on data comes with significant performance expectations. Not only must marketing test, integrate and train on these technologies, but they must become power users while also connecting results to sales.
Stop wasting money on martech toys
Every one of those 7,000+ MarTech firms are clamoring to take your money. They’ll gladly sell you their product (often accompanying long-term contracts), but by no means will they sit side-by-side with you ensuring accountability for the results you must deliver. Sure, the behemoth firms can afford to buy and prove out profitable outcomes. But don’t forget that they have loads of people who can implement and actually spend time on these tools. But what about the 30 million small business owners in the US? These companies are the clients I serve, and they don’t have the people, resources or luxury of time to determine if the shiny new tech toy will deliver miraculous ROI. Pick a couple of tools that truly will meaningfully impact sales and avoid the temptation to buy the latest gadget-of-the-day.
Marketers must deliver profitable results. Or else.
I take stock in Scott Brinker’s MarTech manifesto which reminds us not to forget that it isn’t just the technology, but the people and the processes that are put into place to enable delivering remarkable client experiences and a healthier bottom line. I was fortunate to start my career in finance with P&L oversight. Call me a nerd, but I welcomed the scrutiny of justifying marketing spend to ROI results. No longer do I receive funny looks from people, calling my career choice of Finance and Marketing odd! Nevertheless, gone are the days of being a brilliant creative marketer and getting a pass on delivering results. If you are uncomfortable with numbers, enroll in a class, surround yourself with a finance mentor or even take advantage of the online ROI courses offered by the Social Media giants. Don’t be afraid to call BS when the marketing tech promises seem too good to be true.
Share your stories
I’d love to hear from you about the best and worst marketing tech tools you’ve implemented. Which solutions have become your stalwart pre and post COVID? Any new technology that you implemented specifically to help internal teams improve results? How have you helped produce profitable results for your company?
#DeliverROIResults
#86MarketingWaste
#CutThroughTechToysBS
Keeping marketing accountable
Cheers.
Jessica Kelley is a seasoned leader with more than two decades of marketing and finance experience in B2B and B2C channels. She has worked extensively within healthcare, consumer, commercial, and software industries in diverse environments ranging in size from a $200 billion corporation to a startup firm. Her company, HPZ Marketing is an interim CMO and fractional CMO business and is certified by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) as a Women’s Business Enterprise and Women Owned Small Business (WOSB). They provide interim and fractional executive marketing services to help businesses achieve marketing ROI with executable strategy and a relentless focus on customer acquisition and retention. Learn more about hiring a fractional CMO for your business.
Video music from https://filmmusic.io:
“Fearless First” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)