Insights Blog

The ritual of annual marketing planning can consume weeks, even months, with calculations, debates, and seemingly endless meetings. Yet many marketers have felt the disappointment of seeing their painstakingly developed plans collect dust on a shelf, rarely used. This naturally leads to the question, “Is it worth it?” Other than the fact that we have to plan, is there a compelling logic for developing annual marketing plans?

In our work with numerous world-class organizations, we have identified a few core areas of discipline that leaders of Product Management teams can focus on to drive functional excellence:

Most initiatives related to building a better customer experience emanate from the customer experience function. Others come from well-intentioned marketing and strategy groups. For businesses with a retail operation, sometimes it’s the store management function that starts the ball rolling.

Marketing budgets seem to be under pressure… again. We’ve observed that marketing is often one of the first places companies look to make cuts in an attempt to boost the bottom-line. Driven by the need to prove the value of marketing investments, many leaders have launched metric-related initiatives. However, many such initiatives fail to live up to their goals and are paid scant attention by marketers with overloaded dashboards.

Want to get it right? Here are some principles to aid in the successful design of a marketing metrics program:

In the first three posts of this series, we discussed what it takes for a marketing excellence program to have a sustained impact on an organization. It must have various interlocking components, each designed to address different challenges in getting rapid results while delivering long-term change. Those components are: Design, Implementation, Inspiration, and Measurement. Having already addressed Design, Implementation and Inspiration - in this final post of the series - we will discuss the metrics used to evaluate the progress of a marketing excellence program.

Here we are in the heat of the planning season. We thought this would be the perfect time to share our list of top mistakes made in marketing planning. In dealing with marketing leaders every day, we see the same mistakes across many organizations, and we’d be delighted to help you steer clear of them.

Raise Your Organization's Level of Go-to-Market Capability

How good is your marketing?

You certainly know cost, you have some idea of the return, but do you really know how good your marketing is? The authors view is that marketing’s performance can and should be measured and it should be done at regular intervals to ensure improvements are achieved and opportunities are prioritized. Having a common measuring stick, the ability to gauge performance against peers and making the findings actionable are crucial.

Measuring Go-to-Market Capabilities

To read part 1, click here.

To read part 2, click here.

Where an organization stands in terms of maturity can be determined by measuring overall marketing process linkage and five essential go-to-market capabilities: insights, market strategy, annual marketing planning, integrated marketing, and marketing performance metrics. Working with ANA (Association of National Advertisers), EMM has developed a methodology for both B2B and B2C companies that enables the characterization and measurement of the following:

The Levels of Marketing Maturity

To read part 1, click here.

In considering where your organization stands on marketing maturity, it’s important to understand what a maturity model is—and is not. It is not a rigid structure of prescribed processes. Rather, it has three dimensions. First, it describes the differences among typical marketing organizations, from the least mature to the most mature. Second, it provides a marketing framework that the people in the marketing organization can use to understand how and where their day-to-day work fits in the overall operation. Third, it offers an aspirational model, drawing the organization upward as well as a roadmap for getting from one level to the next. This is what it looks like in broad outline:

Every day in large corporations around the world, hundreds of decisions are made about products (what is offered) and marketing (the customer experience). Individually, these decisions may seem benign, but in the aggregate, they are bet the company decisions.