As I was preparing to present at Eloqua’s Road to Revenue Tour here in the UK this week, on the subject of funnel management in B-to-B, it made me think about the state of readiness of Marketing to embrace the disciplines required to begin to measure ROI. These are all outside traditional Marketing’s comfort zone but it is worth giving them some consideration as they point the way to communicating the true value of Marketing in this digital age.
1. Sales & Marketing Pipeline Process
The ‘process’ word is never popular in Marketing. We like to focus on the ‘art’ side of the question ‘Is Marketing a science or an art?’ We’re creative people; we don’t want to think about the hard task of managing sales-and-marketing-alignment to drive more revenue for the company.
But, as we start thinking about social media, content marketing, marketing automation and other currently popular marketing topics, we should consider that none of this matters without understanding the process of turning the buyer’s initial curiosity into action that ultimately drives our sales opportunities.
2. Data
Ok – even more boring! Contact data, field enhancement, form capture strategies, reporting: data (‘Big data’!) is structured information used for analysis to support decision making. If Marketing doesn’t understand data and how it drives the funnel management process – from capturing contact fields for lead scoring through to campaign metrics (see next point!) – then how can we measure anything useful?
3. Metrics
Return on Investment is the ultimate business metric; the rate of return on our marketing spend. But Marketing often prefers to focus on clicks, open rates, referrals, form fills, YouTube views, followers and ‘Likes’. Maybe these are relevant, maybe they are not. Marketers need to understand the buyer’s journey and how each marketing tactic influences this journey: when and how. Then we can measure the right things, collect the right data (remember point 2?) and show how marketing activity ties back to ROI.
4. Inbound Marketing
The Web has spawned a new digital marketing discipline around inbound marketing. A few years ago, ‘inbound’ was when someone phoned in – or, if you were really lucky, sent you a fax order (remember them?). Now we all need to be optimising our keywords, tracking social media on Hootsuite or Tweetdeck and combining inbound and outbound leads seamlessly with tools like Hubspot, Eloqua and Marketo. Marketing has become much more technical and more specialist. So we also need Marketing Operations to count everything. Which finally brings us on to platforms.
5. Marketing platforms
Email marketing, lead scoring, marketing dashboards. Do you know your MQLs from your SALs and SQOs? Does automated lead nurturing keep you awake at night? If you’re still thinking about how to get ‘more bums on seats’ at the next seminar then you should also be thinking about where your prospects are in the metaphorical ‘funnel’ and how you are helping to overcome any obstacles to their taking the next step towards becoming a customer. You must also ensure this off-line activity is scored correctly by your marketing system so that the next communications stage is properly initiated. In other words, why are they there? And how does being there help increase the likelihood of them buying something in a quantifiable way?
All of which adds up to a complicated digital life for marketeers who are being asked to show the return that they are bringing back to the company. If you’re not yet being asked what the ROI is on the marketing investment the company is making, that may all change in 2013.