Tracking Marketing Performance

The CMO Council, a nonprofit association of senior marketing executives, recently conducted a survey of hundreds of top-ranking marketers (primarily at high-tech firms) to better gauge the industry's understanding and use of marketing performance management (MPM) tools. MPM is just one of a growing battery of disciplines that aims to give substance and accountability to marketing activities. "Marketing is a significant line-item cost for most technology companies, and there is a lot more pressure on companies to justify those expenditures," says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of CMO Council.
Just over two thirds of the 319 respondents to the survey said that their organization employs some form of marketing performance management, but only 21 percent of all respondents rated themselves "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the available capabilities. MPM represents a small component of marketing spending, with half of the companies saying MPM represents less than 1 percent of their overall marketing budget. Fifty-eight percent, however, foresee allocating more resources to the task over the next two years. More than half of the companies surveyed do not measure performance for marketing activities surrounding branding or sales and marketing collateral, and nearly half do not measure the performance of channel marketing and market research programs. This leaves marketing organizations with a great deal of room to grow their understanding of the inner working and impact of their campaigns. "This isn't going to be a technology fix," Neale-May says. "It's a cultural, organizational, and technological challenge."