It’s fairly typical to hear marketing leaders lament their inability to prove out the return on investment of the tactics they’ve deployed.   By nature, the relative return on investment of many marketing tactics is practically measured by level of activity versus level of results.  For example, numbers of qualified leads, number of impressions or growth in website traffic are frequent success measures used to evaluate return on marketing investment. 

Activity-based marketing analysis is a result of many factors, but typically has its roots in lack of data, business-process and infrastructure that hamper true line-of –site between tactic and result.  Best-in-breed consumer packaged goods companies or retailers have built results-based analytics capabilities over decades, but for most companies, this capability remains elusive.  Complexity in the B2B purchase-cycle exacerbates this gap.  Merger or acquisition activity that mismatches data, process and infrastructure can set back even the most proficient results-based marketer.     

Activity-based measures do provide timely feedback to manage marketing tactics and course-correct in real-time.  But, although activity-based measures are valuable to understand relative performance to manage marketing tactics, they quickly become irrelevant in an executive-level conversation regarding profitable revenue growth or EBITDA contribution.  Since marketing budgets are typically one of the few operating expense levers available to manage quarterly financial performance, aggressive short-term reductions in marketing budgets is often more palatable to an organization than reductions in research and development or headcount.

To balance short-term management with long-term strategy, marketing is ideally suited to play a major role, or perhaps even lead, strategic planning.  By definition, marketing should be closest to critical business levers including market dynamics, voice of the customer, competitive actions, pricing, channel efficacy and product assortment.  

A leadership role in strategic planning provides a unique opportunity to position marketing initiatives as critical contributors to achievement of strategic business goals such as customer acquisition, channel efficiency or customer retention.  This alignment in the strategic planning stages provides a platform to temper the pressures on marketing of short-term financial performance with achievement of the longer-term strategic goals of an organization.  

The closer this alignment, the greater the chances that short term adjustments don’t distract an organization from reaching its long-term strategic destination.