Budgeting season is here. Only on rare occasions is it anything but a zero-sum game.
In some companies, budgeting is a lot like hunting season: It feels like the Fish and Game Department sold out of licenses. Still in other companies, marketing struggles to be noticed or heard. It’s as if you walked into the budgeting meeting to find that your chair doesn’t quite reach table height; no one is interested in even your best arguments for funding.
But for a growing number of my colleagues, other executives around their company are actively engaged and helping to put the case together for investment in marketing.
In the places where marketing is actually receiving investments above zero sum, there are two reasons for that change: control and performance. Those two reasons ultimately buy sponsorship from top executives. There is a simple correlation: Control and performance reduce risk and provide greater confidence in achieving returns for investment.
Control is the operative focus for building predictability into marketing performance. Six Sigma black belts get deployed to document the hell out of every aspect of marketing. (They thought they had it tough in manufacturing or service… marketing is a whole new level of fun.) Customers become present and visibly at the center of decisions every single day. IT starts taking interest in marketing resource management (MRM) software vendors.
Consultants are called upon to chart out and implement a roadmap that puts new tools and processes in place and realigns people, metrics, and operational analytics. CRM systems go under the magnifying glass to figure out where any ROI can be extracted. New compensation and accountability are established for the marketing leaders and staff.
Performance is the outcome of changes to the way marketing is managed. Marketing becomes represented in language that the chief financial officer finally understands. Customers are encouraged, even assisted, to advocate the company’s products and services. Metrics are monitored religiously from individual campaigns through aggregate financial and customer returns. Agencies, channel partners, and all customer touch points are engaged and incorporated into defined and designed marketing processes.
New discipline in marketing is at the center of these painstaking and sustained changes that deliver performance. You, as a marketing leader, didn’t get to your position using most of these tools. But these leaders achieving high performance figured out that the value of marketing is in having both discipline and intuition to drive customer value through the roof for their companies.
Four enabling technologies will help enable you to win the zero-sum budget game:
• Customer data integration — resulting in an operational warehouse/data mart
• MRM – managing spending on activities, workflow planning, budgeting, and digital assets
• Analytics software — used pervasively by marketers, not exclusively the purview of a few modelers
• Campaign automation – business rules for selecting or targeting customers, orchestrating marketing activities, and capturing response
Three marketing tools of the trade guide and deliver discipline:
• Customer touch point mapping – focus on interactions that are most valuable
• Integrated measurement – design metrics and reporting across customer lifecycle
• Purposed analytics – focus on relevance, appropriate usage, and affect of analysis
Four tactics enable discipline, achieving predictability and driving superior results:
• Know the customer through his lifecycle
• Establish four layers of marketing measurement
• Link customer response and conversion back to marketing actions
• Manage marketing spend across customer lifecycle by touch point, medium, channel, and customer
For more details on the three tools and four tactics above, download a new white paper “The Discipline of Marketing Performance: Achieving Predictability, Achieving Results” from Quaero and Peppers & Rogers Group. It will be helpful in charting a course to win the zero-sum marketing budgeting game.
Lane Michel is executive vice president/managing director of the Marketing Performance Management business unit of Quaero Corp., a marketing and technology services provider based in Charlotte, NC. You can reach him at [email protected].
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