Marketers call for ‘expanded’ effectiveness capabilities

While CEOs, CFOs and boards want to see greater accountability from marketers around the efficacy of their work, the truth may well be marketing departments simply do not have the right tools at their disposal.

Of the 1,610 brand-side marketers responding to Marketing Week’s Language of Effectiveness Survey, 35% strongly agree with the statement that the company they work for needs to expand its marketing effectiveness capabilities. A further 36.8% of the sample slightly agree with the statement, creating a combined total of 71.8%.

Indeed, less than a fifth (17.9%) of marketers strongly agree they are happy with the analytics available to them to examine the effectiveness of creative.

The statistics suggest a need for innovation to develop more robust means of measurement, as well as a rallying call for companies to invest in the capabilities marketers’ desire. While budgets may be squeezed by the cost of living crunch, businesses which fail to invest in measurement could well be setting marketing departments up to fail.

‘Marketers need to get real’: Addressing the significance of ROI

When asked how regularly they measure effectiveness, almost a third (31.2%) of marketers conduct analysis on an ad-hoc basis, depending on which campaigns are running.

Some way behind, 16.8% of brands carry out effectiveness analysis roughly once a quarter, while a smaller percentage (14.6%) conduct measurement once a month. Some 14.2% of marketers say effectiveness work is carried out on average once a year.

The Language of Effectiveness Survey reveals just 13% of brands have invested in ongoing tracking of marketing effectiveness metrics. Worryingly, 6.9% of the marketers surveyed work for a company that does not conduct any form of marketing effectiveness analysis.

For those marketers who do measure effectiveness, conversion rates are currently the most popular metric being studied (51.7%), followed by new customer acquisition (51.1%) and click-through rates (49.1%).

Just 27.8% of companies currently measure how their marketing has impacted brand attributes, while still fewer (27.1%) measure customer lifetime value and brand affinity (26.8%).

The data suggests marketing effectiveness analysis is more than twice as likely to be carried out on an ad-hoc, campaign-by-campaign basis, rather than as an always on process. Furthermore, almost 7% of the sample work for a company with no effectiveness analysis at all, a concerning statistic given the increasing pressure to make the business case for marketing.

Marketing Week will be digging deeper into the statistics, examining the differences between SMEs and large corporates, and exploring how often marketers should – ideally – be conducting effectiveness analysis.

To read our Language of Effectiveness content so far, click here