I recently fielded an ad hoc survey of European marketers (Northern Europe) on their impressions of how successful they perceived themselves at driving improved marketing effectiveness and support corporate sales objectives. There were some interesting results that I wanted to share with you. On the whole the respondents showed reasonable results in terms of their current tracking and measurement of their marketing effectiveness and ROI.
The bad news on marketing effectiveness and marketing management
There were however 17.9%, just less than 1 in 5 that didn’t measure their marketing effectiveness. Of these, they were clearly no in the critical path to corporate success. This is evident in how they answered the question, “How do you set your marketing budget?” The answers broke down as follows:
- Just less than half of them can’t describe their budgeting process
- Just more than one third claim they do it based on objectives
- Just less than one third set their budgets based on what’s left in the corporate plan
All of these marketers claim that their marketing is not successful at supporting the achievement of the corporate revenue plan. All of them also claim they are doing even to a little bit worse than their competition.
The good news on marketing effectiveness and marketing management
The good news is that over 80% of marketers can measure some or all of their marketing results. They do this by measuring direct response, connecting revenue directly to each marketing activity or doing it across the entire marketing mix. Of these marketers, 70% set their budgets based on marketing objectives. The other 30% split about evenly to setting their budgets based on a percent increase over the prior year or a fixed percentage of plan revenue.
This means that just more than 50% do some measurement and use specific objectives to set their budgets. Unfortunately, just less than 50% don’t measure their results and don’t use objectives to set their budgets. It is these marketers that are simply seen as an expense as opposed to a critical component of the revenue generation process.
If you’d like to hear more about the results from this survey let me know. Or if you would like to read about this, get ready for my upcoming book specifically on this topic. Go to www.DemandROMI.com/EvenMoreROMI.html for more information.
I look forward to hearing from you.
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