A Performance Dashboard for the New CMO

January 22, 2008 12:00 AM

By Linda Passante

The marketing department has traditionally existed outside the revenue column. But, it's time to demand the same demonstrable results that you would require of any of your business units. Marketing is more than a maker of multi-media; it is a catalyst that reenergizes how the company thinks, invests, acts and connects to your bottom line.

However, traditional business standards of measurement don't tie marketing directly to that bottom line and companies struggle to establish performance benchmarks for their marketing teams. So how do you measure the efficacy of your marketing efforts?

Revenue is still the key metric. And your marketing department will help you produce it. But rather than simply measuring quarterly spikes in sales revenue, growth should be linked to activities along the entire customer continuum: reinforcing the brand message with all customer-facing employees, engaging the consumer, and empowering the sales team to close the deal, and training customer service departments to protect your customer relationships.

Evaluate your customer against goals. There is a lot of available data. Lead generation, website visits and click-to-open rates must be measured. But a deeper analysis of the synergistic relationship between marketing and sales should reveal the programs that have delivered the most profitable, long-term customers that every business needs. There are clear indicators of success. How many potential customers are at the top of the pipeline? How did they find out about your service? How many pitches are you converting into business? More important, is the business you're converting in line with your marketing strategies? Global diversification, channel development, and breaking into new customer segments can be more important markers for success than overall sales volume.

Buzzmetrics may be a better indicator of market awareness. Market awareness is always a marker of performance. But, traditionally, it has been a static statistic. In today's engaged marketplace, customer-generated media such as tweets, blogs and online forums can influence your brand's image, impact sales and are important to track. Articles involving your corporation, expert quotes, invitations to speak or requests for intellectual capital are all measures of trust and credibility. Determine if your Google page rank is ascending as you look at mentions of your brand online. By finding the baseline of coverage, you can identify the tipping point for when your company's ideas went mainstream.

Retaining top quality staff is critical in driving revenue. The ethos of your organization should be defined when a new hire walks in the door. By firmly establishing your corporate culture and the expectations of staff, you're enabling your team to create a better customer experience. The appropriate step at every interaction for the customer should be understood and assessed through internal interviews and training knowledge surveys.

Client satisfaction is a key indicator of continued financial stability. Do you have an online brand manager or is your agency "listening" to the chats, tweets and blogs where your customers are commenting? There are now a number of formulas to measure your customers' level of satisfaction, based on their activity. Surveys are a diagnostic tool designed to capture specific customer feedback, identify service gaps and pinpoint weaknesses in operations to more effectively strengthen customer relationships.

Ultimately, you need to develop a dashboard of richer metrics of success, which account for other aspects of business development, in addition to revenue growth. With the creation of multi-dimensional metrics, you can create the same culture of accountability in your marketing department. By formalizing the capture and reporting these metrics, you can streamline your marketing initiatives and also develop a deeper understanding of what drives revenue growth and bottom line performance.

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