Why Evaluate the Performance of Marketing
The intangible benefits of marketing – improving and enhancing brand awareness; educating customers and prospects about product benefits; and strengthening stakeholder relationships – make measuring its financial impact a perplexing and challenging process. Ideally, marketing performance measurement should be a logical extension of the planning and budgeting exercise that happens before a company's fiscal year. The goals that are set should be both measurable and applicable to every marketing role within an organization. Companies employ various methodologies to measure marketing performance and ensure they meet those performance goals.
Business Report
Evaluating marketing performance helps companies plan and budget for the following fiscal year.
Importance of Marketing Performance Metrics
Marketing performance metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) are useful not only for marketing professionals, but also for non-marketing executives. From the chief executive officer to the vice president of sales, the senior management team needs marketing KPIs to gauge how marketing activities and spending impact the company's bottom line. This is particularly important since companies are prone to reduce marketing budgets during economic downturns, downsizing, and mergers.
As marketers face more and more pressure to show a return on investment (ROI) on their activities, marketing performance metrics help measure the degree to which marketing spending contributes to profits. It also highlights how marketing contributes to, and complements, initiatives in other areas of the organization, such as sales and customer service.
Other reasons why companies evaluate marketing performance include:
- Monitoring marketing's progress towards its annual goals
- Determining what areas of the marketing mix – product, price, place, and promotion – need modification or improvement to increase some aspect of performance
- Assessing whether company goods, services, and ideas meet customer and stakeholder needs
Establishing marketing performance metrics is integral to helping brands satisfy customers, establishing a clear company image, being proactive in the market, and fully incorporating marketing into the company's overall business strategy.