What did you talk about?
I discussed the incredible opportunity marketing has today to use analytics to drastically increase return on investment. Companies spend about $1 trillion on marketing globally each year. Our analysis and experience has revealed that companies can squeeze 15 to 20 percent better returns on that spend. That’s as much as $200 billion.
I then covered the five ways companies get there:
- Challenging the current top-down allocation process, which often doesn’t base budget decisions on hard data that focus on the biggest growth opportunities
- Before making decisions, develop a deep understanding of the complete customer decision journey (CDJ)
- Change your marketing mix by shifting spend to channels that maximize your returns
- Get lean to increase your marketing productivity
- Transform the organization to sustain the change with CDJ, mix up marketing spend to win in those battlegrounds, procurement, transformation
What is on people’s minds when it comes to marketing return on investment?
A couple of things struck me when I was speaking.
First, marketers have all sorts of data and tools and analyses, but they’re having trouble making sense of it all at an aggregate level. The explosion of digital, just in the past two years, has led to an explosion in the number of tools out there that claim to help marketers better use that data.
For marketers, however, it’s often unclear how these tools work, what value they deliver, and how they fit in with their broader analytics program. Many marketers are spending far too much time trying the figure out the array of tools available, rather than using them to drive value.
Second, marketers are still struggling with how to use big data. I get the sense that people have high expectations of big data, but are struggling to really extract useful answers from it.
Data isn’t the problem. What’s needed is a framework to systematically identify the marketing goals, as well as the questions that the data need to answer to deliver against them. The “a-ha” moment for many marketers I speak with is this idea of having a disciplined and structured approach to getting answers that will help move the business. Without that, either paralysis sets in, or money is wasted.