Study Reveals Gap Between Marketing Measurement Goals, Performance

Eighty percent of brand marketers said their organizations would grow their focus on marketing performance measurement in 2017, according to a Brand Innovators and Origami Logic study of more than 250 digital marketers. Not surprisingly, survey-takers said they wanted to better measure advertising ROI and assess the effectiveness of various marketing channels (web, social, email, etc.). That’s driving them to invest in improve their capabilities, and they want to know where they should invest their resources for the greatest impact.

Despite the high value they place on marketing measurement, 76 percent of marketers in the survey described their current marketing measurement efforts as “we could be doing more,” “we are doing the bare minimum” or “we are doing nothing.” Only 24 percent rated themselves as leaders or innovators in marketing measurement.

What is holding marketers back from improving their performance in an area they agree is important? The survey identified three inhibitors to the adoption of high-level marketing measurement:

1. The complexity of managing the necessary infrastructure. According to the report, “selecting the right tools” can help with this.
2. Integrating data from different activities. Data standardization may be one way to address this, according to report authors.
3. Struggles with internal resource alignment. Fixing talent gaps may mitigate this challenge.

One thing I’d like to point out is that these three inhibitors are all exacerbated or directly caused by time constraints. In another recent survey, this one by marketing platform provider Emma, “Few marketers identify lack of customer data as a pain point for their team, but over 64% point to not having enough time or enough personnel to do the kind of marketing they would like.”

I don’t disagree that marketers often face serious time constraints. I sometimes feel a bit overworked myself! But I would argue that marketers should make time for marketing performance management anyway, because it will actually save them time in the long run.

Imagine that you invest an hour to conduct an analysis of the social media platforms that are or are not working for your company. Perhaps you find out that one of your channels, which you normally spend an hour on every week, is only yielding half the return on your investment as another channel. If you take the bold step to eliminate the hour you spend in that ineffective channel, and instead invest a half hour each week in your more effective channel, your net effectiveness will stay the same, and you’ll save a half hour a week! It may not sound like much, but over the course of a year, it could save you 26 hours. For busy marketers, that could make all the difference.

Do you want to improve your marketing performance measurement but don’t know where to start? Read about 3 Powerful Website Metrics Anyone Can Track for tips on how to track and interpret metrics that will help you write content that resonates with your audience and create pages with high conversion rates.