By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer
According to Kevin Joyce, CMO and vice president of strategy services with The Pedowitz Group, there’s a significant gap between management’s expectations of Marketing accountability and its ability to quantify its performance.
While 76% of marketing organizations are accountable for, or share accountability for, P&L, only 19% of marketers have comprehensive tracking and reporting practices in place.
Given the roles of traditional marketing that is not surprising. For four of the five basic marketing functions,
• Gathering customer requirements and defining the product and service set
• Helping create and retain customers with demand generation programs, events, social, etc.
• Increasing brand equity
• Managing technology and channel partners
• Empowering the sales channels with market data, prospect data, competitive data and sales tools and collateral,
quantifiable revenue contribution is hard to measure. The exception is demand generation. However, marketing’s role is evolving, and there are areas where we are being held accountable that are not on the list above.
The Rise of Communications
Organizations have always looked to marketing for help with communications. Marcom was a standard function in most marketing organizations. However, the need for customer communication is growing as the number of channels that customers and prospects use to communicate now include email, chat, a variety of social channels, YouTube, podcast channels, websites, blogs, user forums in addition to traditional communications media. Of course, the function in the company most experienced in these channels and technologies is Marketing.
Companies are using marketing to communicate new customer welcome messages, customer feedback communications, license renewal messages, satisfaction surveys, availability of training videos, programs to increase customer adoption, and more.
These are not demand generation communications, they are communications that are part of the product or service that the company is selling, and Marketing is becoming accountable for delivering part of the service.
I welcome feedback, questions, suggestions, experiences and differing points of view. Just give me a call at 610–585 0801 or email me at [email protected].
