The Marketing Performance Blueprint

Strategies and Technologies to Build and Measure Business Success

Paul Roetzer

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118883433
• eBook ISBN: 9781118883587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Discover what's possible when the art and science of marketing collide

The Marketing Performance Blueprint is an actionable and innovative guide to unlocking your potential as a marketer and accelerating success for your business. With an eye toward the marketing industry's rapid evolution, this book focuses on the processes, technologies, and strategies that are redefining the marketing environment. Step by step, you will learn how to build performance-driven organizations that exceed ROI expectations and outpace the competition. Companies are demanding a more technical, scientific approach to marketing, and this guide provides the key information that helps marketing professionals choose the right tools and recruit the right talent to more effectively build brand, generate leads, convert sales, and increase customer loyalty.

Marketers are facing increased pressure to connect every dollar spent to bottom-line results. As the industry advances, the tremendous gaps in talent, technology, and strategy leave many professionals underprepared and underperforming. The Marketing Performance Blueprint helps bridge those gaps:

• Align marketing talent, technology, and strategy to reach performance goals
• Drive digital marketing transformation within your organization
• Recruit, train, and retain a modern marketing team
• Propel growth through digital-savvy marketing agency partners
• Adapt more quickly to marketing technology advancements
• Create connected customer experiences
• Turn marketing data into intelligence, and intelligence into action
• Devise integrated marketing strategies that deliver real business results

The marketers who will redefine the industry in the coming months and years will never stop challenging conventional knowledge and solutions. Whether in terms of evolved talent, advanced technology, or more intelligent and integrated strategies, these driven professionals will be in demand as the pioneers of the new marketing era. The Marketing Performance Blueprint helps marketers blaze a trail of their own by providing a roadmap to success.

Section IV
Marketing Strategy

Chapter 8—Perform a Marketing Assessment—presents the knowledge and tools to conduct a complete review of your organization's marketing potential and performance.

Chapter 9—Develop a Marketing Scorecard—demonstrates how to create a customized marketing performance measurement and reporting system for your organization.

Chapter 10—Strategize a Marketing Game Plan—features a deep dive into the principles and processes of building more personalized and agile marketing strategies using the e3 (evaluate, establish, execute) framework.

Chapter 8
Perform a Marketing Assessment

The assessment is a marketing strategy gateway.

POTENTIAL FOR SUCCESS

Every marketing plan should start with an honest internal marketing assessment. The assessment should consider perspectives from multiple stakeholders, including marketing and sales leaders, as well as key executives. The more involved all parties are in the entire strategic process, the easier it is to align needs, goals, expectations, and priorities.

For example, let's say a CMO, who has been in the position for only a few months, rates his marketing team above average, with perceived strengths in critical areas, including copywriting, social media, and analytics. Meanwhile, the CEO, who has more extensive experience with the team, rates them below average overall, with weaknesses across the board.

This obvious disconnect can have a profound impact on resource allocation and performance. Had the assessment taken only the CMO's view into consideration, the company may have understaffed and underperformed.

When conducting an assessment, invest the time to get a true pulse of the company's foundation, reach, expectations, and potential, all of which play essential roles in marketing talent, technology, and strategy decisions.

Foundation

The foundation tells marketers how much building needs to be done. If your foundation is weak, then resources need to be allocated to strengthen critical areas. If your foundation is strong, then time and money can be focused on short-term campaigns that produce results.

For example, let's say a company with ambitious growth goals intends to heavily invest in lead generation. Plans include adding staff, hiring an agency, and running aggressive digital paid media campaigns. Now, let's assume the company lacks a marketing automation solution, the sales team manages contacts in spreadsheets rather than the CRM system, and there are no content assets—blog posts, case studies, ebooks, research reports—to use in lead nurturing. The company may succeed in generating high lead volumes, but conversion rates and ROI are likely going to be poor until the right foundational pieces are in place.

When evaluating the foundation, primarily consider the strength of business and marketing cores, along with select performance and technology factors. Sample foundation factors that affect your ability to succeed include product/service quality, competitive advantage, revenue growth, corporate culture, employee retention rates, internal and external communications, the marketing team, marketing automation, CMS, and CRM. We further explore these factors in the coming pages.

Reach

Reach represents the size and quality of a company's network. Reach accounts for proprietary contact databases, specifically subscribers, leads, and customers, as well as website traffic volume, social connections, employees, partners, media, and other relevant audiences.

Strong reach signals a company's ability to “move the needle” at will. Companies with limited reach must rely heavily on paid media to drive leads and conversions in the short term, which increases marketing budgets and reduces ROI and profitability. Companies with expansive reach and influence can shift more resources to inbound marketing strategies that attract a steady flow of quality contacts into the marketing funnel, and then efficiently nurture them through to conversion and turn them into more profitable and loyal customers.

Reach ta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I: The Backstory
• Section II: Marketing Talent
• Section III: Marketing Technology
• Section IV: Marketing Strategy
• Conclusion
• Resources
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement