Making marketing pay

March 27, 2009

Being asked to prepare a talk for the Bristol & Bath Marketing Network on ‘Making Marketing Accountable’ has given me some space to reflect on my key learnings on making marketing pay. It was a 20 minute talk at a reasonably high level, just enough to get the conversation started…

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Making Marketing Pay

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Here’s a quick summary:

First off, I asked “who are marketers accountable to?” A great presentation from FutureLab neatly breaks this into three key areas of accountability:

  1. Our world – society, environment, etc.
  2. Our customers – accurate descriptions, no false promises, etc.
  3. Our companies – making a profit, keeping people employed, etc.

For my talk, I focused on the latter and specifically on some key techniques for making marketing pay:

  1. Map out your sales funnel;
  2. Work out which tools do which job through the sales funnel;
  3. Assess activities and spending on these to ensure the funnel flows properly;
  4. Measure movement through the funnel to identify and remedy holes and logjams.

Having done this, there are some key pieces of advice I’d give any marketer:

  1. Put every project, campaign and pound in context – a neat device is to have a funnel icon on all documents with the step the activity pertains to highlighted.
  2. Place any spend report or budget request within the funnel, demonstrating the impact on actual or anticipated sales results.
  3. Maintain your funnel flow – if you need to cut budget, cut evenly through the funnel so you don’t leave any holes… or add spend evenly so you can cope with the extra demand you create.

As you’d expect from a room full of marketers, I was asked some thought provoking questions…

  • How do you work out the percentage through-put from one step to the next? I’d start by work-shopping this internally and reviewing historical data. This gets you to putting a stake in the ground. You then track actual results against this to refine over time – remembering that this is a tool to facilitate conversation between teams and to draw your eye to areas needing attention. Absolute accuracy may never be possible, but this will always help you identify areas of concern or success and prioritise resource and energy.
  • How do you avoid this becoming a finger-pointing tool where marketing point to sales and sales point to marketing? You work out the funnel metrics together and regularly review against it. You can also go further and use the funnel to apportion people’s time against activities in each step, which can help to facilitate inter-team collaboration.
  • How does this work in big companies where small aspects of each step are often owned by different teams who play each other off and get highly political? It doesn’t – this works in organisations where the CEO or MD has bought into the concept and is leading from the top to avoid such in-fighting. I do know that this makes it sound easy and that it really isn’t – but a genuine grasp of sales funnelling in large organisations will often require a full change management programme – such is the nature of turning a tanker.

Some questions from me to you:

In my thinking over the years and in preparing for this talk, I’ve come across some emerging themes, on which I’d love to hear your thoughts:

  • Does ROI obsession create a race to the bottom? If ROI is the king metric, surely the quality and standing of your brand will suffer due to cutting back on ‘fluff’ to make the ROI look better… if this is done continually will you ultimately devalue your own offering? Apple could clearly make more money on each sale by cutting packaging costs, for example, but they’ve prioritised brand over absolute ROI. Is there a lesson there for all marketers in setting, and staying true to, core values for long term value.
  • Analysis versus intuition? How do we, as marketers, balance the potentially conflicting forces of detailed analysis and personal intuition or hunch?
  • Transparency and self protection? I’m a big believer in making everything crystal clear. But, I have certainly encountered marketers who like to maintain a sense of mystery in which marketing is a dark art, so as to protect their own standing or to avoid answering difficult questions. How do we overcome nervousness in some quarters about putting marketing under the microscope and enabling our peers from other disciplines to understand what we do?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Related links and thoughts:

By Bryony Thomas, Director at Clear Thought Consulting | www.clear-thought.co.uk

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Posted by Bryony Thomas