Research shows how dramatically social trust in marketers dropped in the last decade. Ad business is perceived as one of the least trustworthy. But not only consumers have problems with believing marketers: the same applies to CIOs, CFOs and CEOs. 80% of CEOs don’t trust marketers (to quote the report, „they do not really trust and are not very impressed by the work done by marketers”). Why is that?
Accountability
CEOs say that “…they have lost trust in marketer’s business abilities and have given up on holding [them] accountable”. In other words, marketers fail to provide clear and sensible metrics for their performance. How exactly are they contributing to the success of the company?
Learn how to create amazing shopping experience. Download free ebook
That’s where Marketing Automation comes to action. It helps marketers show their value by monitoring precisely their actions and delivering common language with sales team and CEOs, CFOs and CIOs.
Precise measure for success
Marketers are – and should be – the creative force in the company. But they still are a part of economic equation, a cost that shall deliver profit. That’s why marketers need precise metrics and means to monitor and prove their value to CIOs.
No matter how you define marketing and how much emphasis you put on its “human” or “creative” side, it’s still an art of defining and achieving goals. That’s why goals must be specified in measurable ways, so you can provide solid numbers that describe your performance.
Stick to your Key Performance Indicators, to monitor your ideas at work.
Use KPI’s such as:
Cost Per Lead (CPL) = the average cost, often by channel, to secure a sales lead.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) = the average cost, by channel, to secure a customer.
Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV) = the average value of a customer over their lifetime in doing business with the company.
Return on Investment (ROI) = the benefit to the investor resulting from an investment.
Marketing Automation delivers tools to measure all the KPIs you can dream of, what is much needed when marketers don’t know how to measure their performance and prove their value. Only one-third of B2B companies properly measure ROI for marketing activity (source), so no wonder that CEOs perceive them as disconnected from financial issues.
Clear-cut definition of means to achieve that goal
When you see an improvement or growth, it’s vital that you realize why it’s happening: otherwise you can’t repeat it or avoid wrong practices. That’s why marketers must know what do they want to achieve and by what means. Such precise definition of their actions makes testing easier and more efficient.
Marketers’ work is mostly about thinking up new ideas about how to communicate better, and testing them. That’s why keeping a record of means undertaken to achieve given aim and their performance seems vital tool for marketers’ everyday work.
There is a kind of spontaneuous marketers who like to throw ideas into air and test them immediately. Some of their action actually work. But the problem is that in the end of the day they simply can’t tell what exactly was responsible for success and how to repeat it.
Know which indicators are crucial
“78% percent of CEOs think marketers lose sight of their “real job,” as they see it (generating customer demand in a business-quantifiable way), and 69 percent of B2C CEOs think marketers get too caught up in soft measurements (likes, shares, etc.) that CEOs judge to be interesting but not critical”, says report.
It’s easy for marketers to get distracted in this world of fast-passing fads and new solutions. They are so many things that marketers can use, so they try everything and sometimes focus on trivial problems. Also the discipline of marketing is in transition. Think of marketing 10 or 15 years ago: it meant completely different things. With so many new shining tools at their fingertips and knowing that their work changes so rapidly, marketers might experience serious problems with sticking to what’s important to their supervisors.
What marketers say?
Accusations listed above seem pretty serious: they make marketers look really careless. But they actually agree with what CEOs say, but don’t act on that. Why? Due to lack of proper tools. Monitoring your performance is hard without good Marketing Automation software. And there comes vicious cycle: CEOs don’t want to invest in marketing team, because they don’t see results, and they can’t see results without professional tools that measure it.
Marketing Automation helps rebuild the trust within company. It gives sales and marketing common ground, so they can see each other’s performance and manage leads more effectively. It lets CEOs monitor marketers’s performance and see their value to the company.
Follow
