It’s the never-ending question from Finance and the C-Suite: prove your ROI! Measurement, and ROI determination specifically, is something inherently hard to do in marketing. But as more organizations come under budgetary pressure and Marketing becomes more important to other corporate functions, expect measurement to only become more important in the coming years.

In our newly-launched Marketer’s Playbook, we profiled three key things marketing organizations must get right in order to tackle measurement in a rigorous way. Here’s what we think:

Align marketing goals with corporate goals. You’ll learn how to ensure that marketing’s investments support corporate-level (not marketing-level) goals. By linking marketing activities and metrics back to corporate priorities, you increase Marketing’s credibility and give yourself a better platform to showcase your contribution to business performance. Our case studies from some of the world’s most advanced Marketing departments will show you how to collect cross-functional input on marketing metrics, give you tips for securing broad executive buy-in on marketing metrics, and how MLC can help you get input on activities and goals.

Select the right metrics. Once you’ve selected your goals, you’ll need to figure out how to measure them. Easier said than done, right? We’ll show you how to select a small set of meaningful metrics to track marketing performance, ensuring that you don’t invest resources tracking things not aligned to corporate goals. You’ll learn how to narrow down a list of meaningful metrics from the universe of potential ones and get tips for identifying redundant metrics. We’ll also show you how to use MLC tools to build a brand experience storyboard.

Design actionable marketing dashboards. So you’ve selected your goals and your metrics; how do you report progress? We’ll show you how to design user-friendly marketing dashboards that encourage stakeholders to incorporate marketing metrics into the decision-making process. You’ll learn how proper organization and aesthetics drive usage of marketing dashboards, how to design dashboards that are easy to use and act on, and how to design scorecards to communicate metrics effectively.

MLC members, please check out the “Performance Measurement” section of our brand-new Marketer’s Playbook for more.

I looked at my marketing text books one last good time – the pages seemed fairly crisp, but most examples cited in the book seemed obsolete. It seemed like between 2008 and now, marketing had undergone a transformation and the textbook couldn’t keep pace with it. So what happened to the classical marketer – the one whose world circled around the 4Ps? The answer to this question lies in the evolving nature of marketing.

Earlier this year, MLC surveyed a group of 30 leading CMOs on 15 dimensions that they think will influence marketing in the future. The results suggest only one theme – marketing is becoming a smarter function. Some of the top things CMOs identified as value creators for marketing in the future include:

• End-to-end experience management
• Agile planning
• Advanced analytics
• Insight-based marketing
• Enhanced listening capabilities

As marketing’s role is expanding in the face of changing economics and evolving technology, marketer’s roles must evolve too. So what does a next generation marketer look like? Here’s what we heard from our CMOs: Read More »

It’s no secret that, for a lot of large organizations, the very nature of business is changing. B2C brands – once happy to blast one-way messages at static demographic targets and watch the dollars roll in – have been and still are embroiled in a transition to new paradigm, that of one-to-one marketing. B2B marketing organizations are just beginning their forays into social, but they’ve been dealing with an equally-challenging phenomenon – that of growing commoditization of business products and the resulting shift towards solutions.

In fact, I’d argue that the shift away from cyclical commodity sales to non-cyclical solutions sales is the bigger of the two changes – it not only required marketing organizations to acquire new skills and staff up, but it tasked them with essentially creating a new market. For B2B marketing organizations, previously relegated to creating brochures and other content for Sales – that was a big shift, and it’s one that many companies are still navigating.

So how are companies making the shift from sales supporters to a more strategic orientation? The first thing the best B2B organizations are doing is taking a hard look at their talent. Is it ready to support a richer, more strategic commercial presence?

That’s exactly what one company, Dow Chemical, did when the company was faced with a mandate to transition its business from a cyclical, commoditized business to a non-cyclical, solutions-oriented one. Realizing that selling solutions required a bit more than providing salespeople with some interesting collateral, the company put together Dow Marketing University – a training resource designed to get its marketing staff ready to take on a radically-different market and challenge. Using principles and data from CEB’s Marketing Excellence Survey – a survey resource designed to test your marketing organization’s attitudes and skills across a range of key marketing disciplines – the company upskilled its staff across two years, driving strategic marketing ability and ultimately, marketing profitability.

How did they do it? Dow, with help from MES, kept three things in mind: Read More »

It’s a perennial complaint we hear from B2B marketers: “We did all this work to put together a great sales tool/piece of collateral/campaign, but Sales refuses to use it! What’s going on?”

Most marketers throw up their hands, call the salespeople a few choice names (“cowboy” is one I can repeat for a family-oriented business blog like Wide Angle) and just start plugging away again, thinking that someday those dastardly cowboys will realize what Marketing can offer. Others get frustrated and quit.

So what seems to be the problem? In our research into Sales/Marketing alignment, we’ve noted two things: first, salespeople reject 80% of the tools Marketing creates for them. 80%! And second, that the most important driver of this phenomenon is that Marketing lacks a real view into the customer/rep dynamic, and that the tools created don’t reflect the realities of that dynamic.

Two segments of our recently-launched Marketer’s Playbook address this divide head-on: Read More »

In celebration of our newly-launched Marketer’s Playbook, as well as our upcoming Marketing Development webinar on social, we thought we’d distill some of the best social media advice we’ve gotten from leaders in the space over the last few years. Here are a few things you can do to develop your skills: Read More »

I’ll admit – I’ve been mentally dismissive of “social commerce” since the term began washing up in the never-ending tide of new trends in the space a few years back. It just didn’t make sense: why buy something on Facebook when I could buy it on a company’s website, or on Amazon, or at an actual brick-and-mortar location? It didn’t make sense to me, at least not then.

I’m still skeptical about the idea of F-commerce; the whole thing feels very much like AOL circa 1995, when brands launched “channels” within the walled garden that was AOL at that time. When I hear “Visit us on Facebook…” in an ad, I mentally go back to old copy that asked listeners to “Go to AOL keyword…”. But regardless of whether Facebook lasts longer than the heyday AOL’s dial-up business, or whether people ever seriously buy on Facebook in large numbers, one genie looks to be out of the box: people will increasingly share what they desire and what they ultimately buy on the internet.

How so? Check out this piece on what Facebook shoppers look like. Christian Taylor, the CEO of Payvment, a platform that processes most Facebook commerce, tells WebProNews that most buyers on the site are women – specifically stay-at-home moms –  buying cute things for their children, like baby clothes and hair accessories. When men shop on Facebook, they often buy cause-related t-shirts – ones that raise money for a charity, for instance.

What’s the similarity between those things? They’re all examples of things people buy conspicuously. In the case of cute baby clothes, it’s perhaps an outgrowth of the central role Facebook now has for connecting mothers to each other (as I’ve gotten older, I can see the number of parenting-related conversations growing exponentially; I’m sure you’ve noticed it too). As a result, young mothers see Facebook as a place where they can share more parenting-related decisions in general, including new things to dress their kids in. And, of course, advertising the causes one supports is a phenomenon as old as the bumper sticker.

But beyond Facebook, the recent trend of Pinterest-like sites indicates that there’s a real desire on the part of consumers to share products they’re affiliated with – whether they’ve bought them, would one day like to buy them, or whether they just think they’re cool. But by opening product affiliation to social influence, what was once an individual buying decision – someone pointing at something and saying, yes, I want that – has now implicitly become a group purchase. Your social network won’t literally weigh in on your every purchase, but their anticipated reactions might.

That opens up a huge playground and enormous challenge for marketers – not only do you need to influence the buyer, but you also have to influence the buyer’s social circle. What that means, I’m not sure – but it’s worth keeping an eye on, anyway.

According to some, the world is in a state of stagnation when it comes to innovation. Last year, in reaction to that, I asked if there weren’t still pieces of low-hanging fruit in management – are there things that innovation processes don’t consider? Places managers don’t look for innovative ideas?

We’ve noted that ideas and products that derive from customer-focused innovation processes are most likely to survive and succeed in the marketplace, so part of our recently-launched Marketer’s Playbook is a section on innovating with customers in mind. We think if you can convincingly cover all three of these bases, you’ll be well on your way to creating great, consumer-focused innovations: Read More »

For a very long time, Coca-Cola has been at the forefront of global marketing. An American company, headquartered in Atlanta, created a brand that’s recognized around the globe – and, in the process, has learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

That’s why we decided to take a look at Coke’s Open Happiness campaign, an initiative launched in 2009 with the aim of reinforcing the Coke brand around the world. Iterating on a theme of “Coke = happiness”, Coke and their agency, Weiden + Kennedy, developed an integrated campaign – including in-store, print, music, mobile, digital, social, outdoor and some very innovative event elements – that was ultimately localized to every region of the globe.

But plenty of brands have tried to do such a thing – develop a comprehensive, integrated campaign that spans geographies – and have failed. Why did Coke succeed? We think it had to do with two things: Read More »

A picture can say a thousand words – it does sound clichéd.  Marketers who engage in visual marketing realize the fact that images are more impactful at conveying information than elaborate messaging. So how can marketers use the power of imagery to further their marketing objectives? Presented below are four lessons on how companies can leverage the power of visual marketing to their advantage: Read More »

As I’m sure most know, we at MLC have been knee deep in our 2012 research project for a few months now (check out what it’s about! and register for the meeting!). Roughly speaking, we’re looking at ways marketing organizations can best take advantage of sustainable evolving demand – emphasis on the sustainable. In other words, we’ve surmised that the best thing marketers can do in an era of evolving expectations is not to chase daily fads but is focus on new demand that is long-lasting. Determining sustainability, of course, is a lot easier said than done.

In any case, in the process of looking into what kinds of things marketers can do to identify sustainable demand, we started thinking about what it is, exactly, that marketers do in general. We basically are starting to think that all marketing activities can be filed into one of two buckets: Read More »