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Who's Going to Care About Metrics?

If true, Rob's statement would indicate that someone from each discipline would be present during -- at least -- the strategy portion of a client engagement. Unfortunately, while Rob's assertion is indeed correct, the team approach as he's suggested isn't quite there yet in my experience.

For many businesses marketing is still a silo-ed endeavor that exists as a necessary but somewhat mystifying expense on the company's profit and loss statement. Everyone knows marketing is important because, well, it is. It's supposed to "do something" for us. Make the phone ring? Make people feel good about our brand? What's marketing supposed to do again?

As you can see, we're supposed to care about marketing but we can't exactly put our finger on why. This statement is nearly always proven true when budgets are really tight and the finance department is asking for a contribution to cost-savings -- marketing tends to be one of the first to go.

Until now.

We've entered a new era of the accountability and measurability of marketing. In this new era -- where we're literally driving at specific marketing performance metrics -- the age old segregation between finance, IT and marketing must and can absolutely come to a close.

Because marketing can no longer purely exist as an immeasurable expense on the P & L statement, we need to influence accounting and management processes too. Here are questions that need to be addressed:

1. How much are we willing to pay to acquire a lead or a customer?
2. How much gross margin are we willing to invest in marketing?
3. Are we planning to hold all marketing campaigns -- offline and online -- accountable to performance? Or just that which we can measure?
4. Are we planning to hold our agencies and marketing partners accountable to return-on-investment performance?

In order to answer these questions, marketing, IT and finance need to put their collective heads together and determine what's achievable and when. Often times, in these still-early stages of Internet marketing and commerce, those of us involved in web marketing are the first to bring actual, empirical data to the table. We can prove what's working and what's not.

We're all fighting the good fight because of metrics. We can rally around a common goal of enriching our respective companies by holding us all accountable to performance standards. Doing so will be good for our businesses, shareholder values, and individual careers.

Until next month,

Andrew Eklund
CEO