There’s never been a more urgent time to implement marketing ROI processes. Companies are dependent on marketing organizations to win a greater share of profitable business in a very tight competitive market. At the same time, marketing expenses are under scrutiny, and it’s important to hold tight to the best investments while trimming only waste and low-performing investments. Most marketers do work toward the objective of generating profits even if other metrics are used to guide their decisions. Marketers must make advancing their marketing ROI capabilities a priority for 2003 and here are six key reasons why. | It’s a lot less fun to play sports when you don’t keep score, so why not align your marketing measures with the goal that really matters—profits. Applying marketing ROI tools and techniques during the planning and measurement stages will lead to more profitable marketing. It helps support the need to target more valuable customers and to earn a greater share of customers. It keeps spending in check and leads to integration that manages customers through the sales cycle from awareness and understanding to closed sales and loyalty. The benefits of more profitable marketing extend to employees, shareholders and customers. It truly is a competitive edge to have more profits that can be reinvested. Taking action to implement marketing ROI requires a careful approach to ensure that processes and tools are accurately aligned with the decision process to deliver the appropriate goals. Marketing ROI is not extremely complex, but it’s rare that companies get it completely right. Accenture’s Insight Driven Marketing report in December 2001 showed that 68% of marketing executives indicate they are challenged by their inability to measure campaign ROI. This could even be underestimated. Adding to the problem is the industry itself. More than half of the ROI calculators that I’ve come across on the Internet do not provide accurate calculations (some can be found on very well-respected Web sites, which shall remain unnamed for now). In addition, articles published on the topic of marketing metrics and ROI are often inaccurate. Without accurate marketing ROI processes, practitioners will make poor decisions and profits will not be optimized.
