Make sure your marketing leader is focused on metrics that matter to your business.
Is your startup’s marketing team struggling to connect effort to business goals?
Consider this statement:
Most marketers know how to market, but they don’t know how to make money marketing.
If you’re running a startup, or investing in marketing to take your company to the next level, these words should give you pause.
Or, maybe you don’t have time to pause. But, then, that’s kind of the problem.
Tactical marketing directors serve a critical purpose. If your company wants to get to the next level, it needs a marketing expert who knows how to create campaigns, drive engagement and push leads through the proverbial funnel.
When a company is going to market, speed and momentum are paramount. To sit still is to die—literally, to die.
So you focus on creating content. You think, just get it out; we’ll worry about metrics when we have the leads.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this thinking. You have to start somewhere. The problem that a lot of startups and small companies have is that, as they scale, their marketing budgets develop faster than their marketing brains.
Marketing directors, instrumental in creating those momentous early campaigns, are either outmatched or overwhelmed, or both, when it comes time to demonstrate, through quantifiable reporting, the impact of their efforts on top-line revenue.
This is where your marketing director can show he or she has got what it takes to earn the title of CMO. Or, tougher, where you know it’s time to make a change.
It’s all in the numbers
Marketing directors and CMOs love to talk metrics. But don’t be fooled: There’s a big difference between data and quantifiable business results.
Any marketing leader with a Marketo account can easily prepare a dozen reports for your next sales or revenue call. But beware of numbers as window dressing. One of the best ways to quickly assess if your marketing leader gets it is to look at the types of metrics they reach for when it’s time to shine.
An all-star marketer has hard metrics at their fingertips. How many new names did your campaigns generate? How many MQLs did you hand to sales this quarter? What’s your marketing return on investment? How much revenue can be attributed to clients that either originated as marketing leads or were influenced by marketing campaigns during the sales process?
As CEO, these are the sorts of metrics that matter.
On the other hand, soft metrics—I’m talking email sends, deliverables, click-through rates, bounces, etc.—have no place in c-suite meetings. If your marketing lead elects to kick off a presentation with these numbers, alarm bells should sound. No matter how great their campaigns, this approach betrays a clear disconnect between tactical ability and strategic purpose. Worse, it’s a waste of time.
Marketing, like any area of your business, is an investment. While certain aspects—branding, for example—are harder to quantify, demand generation and lead scoring have a clear and increasingly traceable relationship to revenue.
Don’t wait forever
Initially, marketers might hesitate to share these metrics. It takes time to create content, generate campaigns and acquire baseline data. You need to give your team a runway, and some up-front investment. But make sure they know the clock is ticking.
Once the system is in place and data is coming in, your marketing leader needs to set ambitious annual and month-over-month goals. Those goals should be attached to hard numbers, with clear revenue targets. Marketing can get expensive. If your CMO isn’t constantly poring over the numbers, measuring what’s coming in against what’s going out, your company is not going to make money marketing (revisit statement #1).
Think of your marketing operations as an algorithm that needs to be constantly tweaked and updated as it learns—and, if you really want to boost revenue, set out to hire or train a marketing quant.
Are you experimenting with ways to apply metrics-based thinking to your marketing? Let’s talk shop. Visit www.contentbetter.com and book your free 20-minute strategy session.
