If I asked a group of marketers about their top marketing objectives, I bet some of the most common answers would include building awareness, attracting customers, retaining customers, and finding employees.
These objectives are fine, but they aren’t the right ones to pursue. They’re secondary to the foundational goals that should underpin every marketing program: Revenue, profit, and stakeholder value.
A company’s marketing efforts must drive its primary business objectives, but too often marketers get distracted by what appears to benefit a business instead of focusing on what really produces tangible business outcomes.
Stop Chasing the Wild Goose
Too many modern marketers make the mistake of pinning their focus and attention on shiny vanity metrics—followers, clicks, likes, impressions, and page views. Vanity metrics are indicators; don’t ignore them, but don’t confuse them for top-level goals. If you can’t give likes and shares an actual dollar value, they aren’t worth your single-minded focus.
Hitting “X” number of page views or “X” number of likes may feel good, but tactics need to drive revenue, profit, or stakeholder value. Until marketers have a solid grasp on Business 101, there’s no way they can or should develop a marketing strategy with any expectation that it will work—and the C-suite knows it.
Going Digital Minus Business Basics = Failure
A 2012 report from the Fournaise Marketing Group revealed that 80 percent of CEOs don’t trust marketers; they feel they’re “disconnected from bigger financial realities” and not truly focused on ROI generation. Generally speaking, I don’t think they’re wrong—and not much has changed over the past few years. Marketers continue to apply the wrong metrics to their efforts.
Companies are going to great lengths to incorporate digital into their marketing strategies, prioritizing an effective omni-channel presence and the potential of new technologies like geotargeting, automation, and personalization. And, they should: Customers expect it, and the winners will be the companies who are able to adjust and adapt. “Four of the top 10 incumbents in each industry will be displaced by digital disruption in the next five years,” according to the Global Center for Digital Transformation.
However, while they’re fixated on digital, marketers often lose track of the underlying business drivers. There’s an “everybody’s doing it” herd mentality that blinds them. For instance, many marketers aim to catch up to competitors without considering how different both companies might be in their overall mission or strategy. Others hold to the “if you build it, they will come” delusion; they won’t, and an already limited budget can be wasted trying to buck the trend.
How to See Your Marketing Program Through a Business Lens
In our new book, The Ultimate Field Guide to Digital Program Management, my co-author, Olivier Blanchard, and I explain how businesses can create a digital program that gets concrete, dollar-value results, in addition to those secondary digital outcomes.
The first step is to identify your business objectives. Don’t fixate on whether you should be on Instagram or Periscope—that comes later. Get a solid understanding of which needles the business—as a whole—needs to move.
Once you know the business objectives, create a roadmap that ties them all together. Every department has a role to play in that success; it doesn’t hinge on business development, sales, or even a wiser marketing department. How does your department help move the whole business forward?
By shifting the way you see marketing from vague-if-interesting statistics to a more business-centric lens, you’ll be able to draw a stronger line from marketing tactics to overall outcomes. Your marketing activities will have a greater bottom line impact as a result.
Additional Resources on this Topic
These Are the Creative Marketing Strategies for Building Huge Consumer Brands
How to Translate Business Objectives into Measurable Goals
The State of Integrated Marketing [Survey]
This post was first published on Forbes.
