Marketing Performance
Efficiency vs. Effectiveness Metrics
In his book, The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker explained the difference between efficiency and effectiveness: “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” He strongly advised focusing first on effectiveness before efficiency. Along with outcome-based and leading-indicators metrics, Marketers also need both efficiency and effectiveness metrics. Here’s an easy way to distinguish whether your metric is one or the other:
- If the metric is measuring how well you squeeze out waste or cost or measure maximum output for input, it’s most likely an efficiency metric. Marketing spend, ROI, and cost/per lead, lead/rep are examples of efficiency metrics.
- If the metric is measuring how well you are contributing to or producing a desired result, it is most likely an effectiveness metric. Share of preference, share of wallet, products/customers are examples of effectiveness metrics.
As we have learned from over a decade of research on marketing metrics, many marketers are doing a good job of establishing, monitoring, and managing efficiency metrics and not as good of a job with developing, measuring, and managing effectiveness metrics.
This propensity to focus on efficiency metrics ultimately creates a problem for marketing. You can be improving efficiency, which has nothing to do with whether or not what you are currently doing is the right thing to do, while not actually becoming less effective. Effectiveness is about achieving the right result, or being on the right path. When we are positively impacting and contributing to the right result, then we earn our right to participate in strategic conversations.
It may be easier to identify, track and manage efficiency metrics but that may not be the only reason we see more efficiency related metrics. Many people assume that they are on the right track so if and when there is a problem, they address it by trying to make the process more efficient without questioning whether they are going in the right direction. But if you are going in the wrong direction, becoming more efficient will actually make the problem worse. For example, let’s say your company wants to grow its revenue by some amount. As a marketer, you believe you can affect this by producing some additional business from existing customers. So, you are monitoring and improving the inquiries, deals, cost per new deal, etc. The company is growing but its market share is declining. Why, because the growth opportunity is really outside the existing customer segment. So while marketing is becoming more and more efficient at generating business from existing customers, the company’s market share is actually declining and the competitors are achieving greater market dominance.
What’s really important is effectiveness. In the end, it doesn’t matter if your business is spending the least amount possible or your demand-generation initiatives are streamlined. What matters is whether marketing is solving the right problems and moving the right business needles.
Before you start thinking about how to improve your efficiency, step back and think about how marketing is expected to move the needle and measure its effectiveness. Don’t misunderstand, efficiency is extremely important and you will need efficiency metrics. Improving efficiency can make a difference, but only if you’re on the right path. And the only way to know that is to have effectiveness metrics in place as well. Efficiency is important, but powerless without effectiveness. Effectiveness opens the door for efficiency.
Translate Data into Business Value with These Four Tips
In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, where an enormous amount of new data is being generated every day, more and more companies are trying to increase the usability of this data. As Tom Davenport and DJ Patil note in a Harvard Business Review article, “If the information most critical to your business resides in forms other than rows and columns of numbers, or if answering your biggest question would involve a “mashup” of several analytical efforts, you’ve got a big data opportunity,” hence the rise of the data scientist as one of the “Sexiest Jobs of the 21st Century.” These folks are tasked with turning data into actionable insights and these insights turn into knowledge the company can use to make decisions, measure and manage performance.
This ability to understand the relationship between data and knowledge is essential for marketers that want to be able to tap into the power of data. In 1990, Stephen Tuthill from 3M illustrated the distinction and relationship between data, information, knowledge and wisdom in his “The Data Hierarchy”. To briefly recap, the basic idea is that data, unprocessed facts and figures without any added interpretation or analysis (which is often strings of alpha-numeric or graphic images) carries no meaning.
It is important to remember that whether structured or unstructured, data is at the bottom on the pyramid. It carries no inherent meaning until we begin to synthesize and analyze it and use it toanswer specific questions. Once we begin to organize and sort data, it can then be used to answer a specific question. At this stage we are interpreting the data so that it has meaning and relevance. When we are able to assimilate this information so we can use it to take action or make a decision, we gain knowledge.
Peter Drucker wrote in The New Realities (also in 1990), that “knowledge is information that changes something or somebody — either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action.” When we process this knowledge and distill out the essential principles, data, information, and knowledge are transformed into wisdom.
So why do we care about an idea that is over 20 years old? This 20 year old concept can be very helpful as we all try to grapple with Big Data, that mountain of unstructured data being generated from social media, websites, video, store transactions, etc. There are a number of technological issues associated with the capture, storage, and management of “big data”. However, using The Data Hierachy reminds us that the real value of data is in the knowledge and wisdom we can derive from it. This means we need to have the analytical skills and capabilities to identify and relate the patterns found in the data, the information, to our business operations.
Here are four tips for translating data into business value:
1. Define the specific business question and identify and prioritize the information you need before you dive into the data. Data can be like a siren, dangerous, beautiful and luring. Consider the factors that will impact the quality and use of your data.
2. Itemize the information you will need to achieve the business objective and/or measure your performance.
3. Data and information must be relevant to a specific purpose. Determine what data (unprocessed facts) will be relevant, gather and record it. Data sources may be internal or external; public or limited access; hard or soft; qualitative or quantitative; formal or informal. Take particular care when you use data that has already been processed into information for a purpose different from your own.
4. Prepare to act. Information-driven insight are only as valuable if you act upon. Data of any kind offers organizations the opportunity to derive detailed, timely insights (information) and act on them with greater speed and agility (knowledge). Achieving this type of real-time responsiveness will require organizations to become far nimbler about how you manage business processes and workflows.
Achieving the vast potential from data calls for a thoughtful, holistic approach to data management, analysis and information intelligence. Organizations that take strategic approach to using data, whether they are leveraging the Data Hierarchy or some other paradigm, will be better prepared and positioned to generate business value from their data.
Customer Conversations: Taking the Budget Conversation from Effort to Impact
In a recent conversation with one of our customers, a VP of Marketing at a well-known company, we discussed the challenges associated with her leadership’s request to submit the fiscal year’s budget before her team had finished the planning process. “Without a plan”, she asked, “how can the right investment be determined and requested?” Before it was even complete, her budget was under fire, and there was the concern that no matter what number was supplied, the budget could be cut back. Understandably, frustration ensued.
This very situation is an example of why it is so important to build a measurable marketing plan that is directly aligned with business outcomes. Once the outcomes are identified and it is understood which ones Marketing is expected to impact and how, the conversation shifts from talking about activities to talking about business value.
Here is the advice we offered, and perhaps you have some additional thoughts:
- Comply with the request. If you can, avoid allocating dollars by activities. Rather, try to allocate the dollars by marketing objective.
- Finish the plan, including the required investment. The plan must illustrate the connection between marketing activities and programs, and the marketing objectives and business outcomes.
- Use the plan as a scenario analysis tool.
- Take the allocated budget and apply it across all the programs, activities, and tasks, indicating where there are variances. This will provide insight into whether you have any funds that can be moved to cover shortages. If you can, and all the efforts are adequately funded, then you are set. If not, you will need to determine if the objective can be accomplished by eliminating certain programs, tasks and activities. This is where the fun part begins.
If you’ve created the plan so that the line-of-sight is clear, the implications to the outcomes will become evident as you allocate funds across the different scenarios. It will also become clear whether slight or major adjustments to activities, programs, or performance targets are required. If major adjustments are needed, or should it appear that the funds are too lean–there just isn’t enough wood behind the arrow to warrant even doing the tasks–you will need to engage in a prioritization conversation.
Which outcomes are more important?
Which objectives are more important?
It may even be necessary to change a strategy or eliminate a business initiative. Or, it may just turn out that the leadership team believes that everything must be addressed and give you the money. Then of course, the onus will be on marketing to deliver, but you will have the means to be successful.
Analytics: The Essential Ace in Every Hand
None of us would agree to play a card game with cards missing from the deck; we would know that the odds of winning would be significantly diminished. Yet surprisingly, many marketers are willing to implement marketing programs sans analytics.
In the past few weeks I have attended several marketing conferences. At each event, marketers are talking enthusiastically about how to make Web sites, SEO, social media, email campaigns, and mobile better. However, there is very little conversation about how to be smarter. Analytics is an essential card — actually an ace — in every marketer’s deck for enabling fact-based decisions and improving performance, and most importantly, for being smarter.
While the ace alone has value, when played with other cards its power is truly revealed. And when it comes to analytics, the other card is data. Yes — we have all heard the common complaint about the elusiveness of quality data. Unfortunately, data quality has been an issue in organizations for so long that it has now become the ready excuse for why marketers cannot perform analytics. To harness the power of your analytics card, identify your data issues and create a plan to address them.
Another reason that you may overlook this missing card in your deck is that guessing or gut instinct has been working well enough. Unfortunately, this approach may not suffice in the long-term and your “luck” may run out as organizations push to make “smart” decisions. As marketers, analytics is our opportunity to actively contribute to fact-based decisions. Through analytics, marketers achieve new insights about customers, markets, products, channels, and marketing strategy, programs and mix. It also enables marketing to help improve performance, competitiveness, and market and revenue growth.
As the importance of analytics gains momentum, marketers with analytical acumen will be in great demand. According to some resources, the complexities of data analysis and management are becoming so enormous that there is a shortage of people who are able to conduct analysis and present the results as actionable information. Taking the initiative and honing your analytical capabilities will enable you to make sure you have this ace in the deck — and preferably, in your hand.
Most of us are already working with a time and resource deficit. Try to find a way each quarter to bolster you analytical skills. Attend a conference, read a book, take a class, and bring in experts you can learn from. Here are some key analytical concepts and skills to add:
· Quantitative Decision Analysis
· Data Management
· Data Modeling
· Industry and Competitive Analysis
· Statistical Analysis
· Predictive Analytics and Models
· Marketing Measurement and Dashboard
If you can build your analytics strength, you’ll always have an ace in your pocket.