You can’t deliver effective marketing and great customer experiences without accountability. In other words, there must be a direct link between marketing dollars, business outcomes and customers experiences. But the persistent martech and adtech fragmentation can make that feel like an impossible task.
SO WHERE DO YOU START?
The first step is changing the way you measure marketing success – judging every cent spent on marketing by outcomes instead of engagement. That’s a nuanced process, but here are some big frank questions to get started.
1. Is your marketing responsible?
Adtech and martech acceleration have increased access to customers. Truly accountable marketing uses that access responsibly by prioritising relevance, respect and restraint every time they reach out to people.
2. Is your marketing performance measured by customer outcomes?
Truly accountable marketing measures success by real customer outcomes – by being useful, helpful, informative and maybe even fun. And critically, it connects those customer outcomes to their real business significance.
3. Is your marketing intentional?
Good personalisation looks very different when you start judging marketing by effectiveness rather than impressions. Every personalised touchpoint should exist because it’s the best possible interaction at that given moment, not just because it’s possible.
4. Is every team aligned with the same goal?
Siloed teams easily get myopic on their individual focus and lose sight of marketing’s overall job:
to deliver great customer experiences that drive desired business outcomes.
5. Is every functional team incentivised and empowered to work toward the same goal?
There’s a difference between knowing that everyone is working toward great customer outcomes and actually measuring success by that standard.
6. Is your marketing visible across every functional team?
Even if your teams agree on priorities and incentives, they still need cross-functional transparency to meaningfully work toward that goal with easy, fast and accurate visibility into each other’s activities.
7. Does your marketing manifest as a singular customer experience?
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes by thinking about the companies you interact with. How often do you feel guided through a logical sequence of relevant, timely touchpoints? How often do you not?
8. Is your marketing supported by an evidence mechanism that determines causation between spend and outcome?
Accountable marketing depends on holistic, real-time, people-based transparency, using addressable performance and mapped to desired business outcomes.
9. Is your marketing transparent?
Just like great relationships, great marketing is not only meaningful; it’s respectful and inclusive.
10. Do you have a partner with a strategic vision for how to bring it all together?
Solving the marketing accountability conundrum across adtech and martech is no easy task. Look for a single partner who has a wide range of tech, expertise and ecosystem relationships, most importantly one that understands your business goals and can act as your guide, strategist, and chief accountability partner as you navigate the world of customer experience, technology, data management, identity, and compliance.
