Are Your Marketing Metrics in Sync with Organizational Goals?

As part of Solutions Review’s Contributed Content Series—a collection of contributed columns written by industry experts in maturing software categories—Upendra Sai Matsa, the Director of Consulting Services at LatentView Analytics, explores the importance of ensuring that your marketing metrics are aligned with your company’s goals.

Congratulations on a successful marketing campaign! You’re thrilled it achieved its intended purposes, with all the goals and objectives checked off. In the past, it was challenging to quantify effectiveness, engagement, conversion rates, and results, but now, digital tools allow us to verify campaign success more accurately. 

However, the ultimate question remains: does marketing success directly contribute to organizational success? With technology advancements, organizations can hyper-personalize their messaging, reach new audiences, generate leads, and increase brand awareness. But, it’s crucial to look at the bigger picture and ensure that marketing metrics align with organizational objectives. 

Marketing Success and Organizational Metrics 

As a function, marketing does not operate in isolation. One Salesforce study revealed that 70 percent of CMOs today prefer to align their KPIs and metrics with those of the CEOs. According to Forbes, the general sentiment around marketing is that organizations expect every marketing dollar spent to yield a return, ultimately contributing to revenue and sales growth.

To achieve this alignment, the first step is understanding organizational goals and defining the marketing metrics that measure progress effectively. Regular monitoring of marketing metrics helps identify areas needing improvement and allows for adjustments to campaign strategies. Marketers must sift through information to gain actionable insights in the era of complex customer journeys and vast data. Analytics plays a critical role here, enabling organizations to collect and consolidate data from various channels. Through an analytics-driven framework, campaigns can be personalized, gaps can be filled, trends can be monitored, and results can be forecast. 

Analytics-driven marketing campaigns increase the chances of targeting the right audiences and driving desired actions such as clicks, purchases, or conversions. This approach ensures optimal utilization of marketing budgets and identifies areas where brand awareness needs improvement. One challenge is the over-reliance on user-level campaign-related KPIs without linking campaign success to organizational outcomes. Organizations need to measure how campaigns impact the business overall. 

Analytics can go beyond specific objectives and align marketing efforts with organizational goals. For instance, consider a new feature in a product’s latest version, like a TV. While impressions of ads about the TV’s new feature are essential, analytics delves deeper to understand its impact. This includes measuring customer inquiries, website clicks, and the conversion of inquiries into sales. 

To achieve this, analytics breaks down campaign effectiveness into three stages: aggregating impressions, focusing on feature adoption and awareness, and measuring its impact on sales. This comprehensive approach better explains how campaigns contribute to intended objectives and overall top-line growth. 

The RevOps Push 

For organizations aiming to align marketing metrics with overall goals, RevOps (revenue operations) offers a solution. RevOps integrates sales, marketing, and customer service teams, streamlining processes and maximizing revenue. A study conducted by BCG found that organizations that invest in RevOps have reported a 10–20 percent increase in sales productivity.  

RevOps focuses on streamlining processes, breaking down organizational silos, optimizing performance across departments, and maximizing customer lifetime value. With RevOps, marketing teams can work more closely with sales teams to ensure that quality leads are generated, which are more likely to convert into sales. This alignment can lead to better communication, increased collaboration, and a more efficient sales process. So, why aren’t more organizations embracing RevOps to streamline their marketing operations? 

While RevOps enhances the sales processes, several disadvantages prevent organizations from fully embracing it:  

• Most organizations work in silos since various departments have their systems and databases. Achieving total collaboration requires a mindset shift to break down cross-functional barriers. 
• With such disjointed systems and metrics, putting the data in context is difficult, resulting in misalignment between departments.

Although challenges exist, analytics plays a pivotal role in addressing them. It generates a unified data view, standardizes processes, and enhances team collaboration, making successful RevOps implementation more achievable. 

Ultimately, marketing aims to attract customers to an organization’s product and service offerings and convert them into buyers. By aligning marketing goals with organizational goals, organizations can drive growth, increase revenue, and build a strong brand that resonates with their customers. Marketers’ involvement in the business planning process and leveraging analytics and RevOps are crucial to unlocking success in marketing campaigns and driving business outcomes.