Here’s Part 10 of the Marketing Performance Index. In this installment, I’m going to share a Top 10 list of ideas to improve marketing performance over time. Some of these ideas will have more impact on your business than others. The key is to understand what can drive the most improvement at the lowest cost with the least effort, and so on. Here’s the list.
- 📊 Manage Metrics: identify the best areas to improve performance at the lowest cost
- 🤝 Achieve Alignment: get the GTM and ELT teams aligned to your plans and measures
- 💡Leverage Insights: from each performance indicator to boost returns in priority areas
- 🎯Create Differentiation: in a sea of sameness, you need to differentiate and stand out
- 🌟Elevate Brand: create and enhance your brand purpose, identity and personality
- 🎨Inspire Creativity: successful campaigns are as much about creativity as structure
- ✨Upscale Talent: build high-performance teams with, curious, driven, high achievers
- 🆘Seek Help: get outside expertise to speed your path, add know-how and bandwidth
- 🚀Boost Performance: amplify key marketing performance tactics to increase ROI
- 🔄 Continually Improve: adopt a mindset that everything can be refined and improved
📊Manage Metrics
While each of these Top 10 tips are important, I would argue that the first one, Manage Metrics is the most critical. If you can’t get agreement on what metrics matter most, what good looks like and how your success will be measured against expected results and benchmarks, it’s likely going to be a rough ride. In their recently published SaaS Marketing Periodic Table, enriched by the most recent quarterly data from their diverse portfolio of private and public SaaS companies, Insight Partners noted: “all companies are unique and should seek to improve performance regardless of where they measure against benchmarks.” Exactly. As I’ve shared previously, the Marketing Performance Index is a diagnostics based on comparative benchmarks – each company needs to establish their metrics and targets that best determine success.
There are several other benchmarks that can be used, e.g. from research firms like Gartner and Forrester Decisions (formerly Sirius), and a couple of dedicated SaaS benchmarking organizations like Benchmarkit and Benchmarker. Benchmarkit updates benchmarks quarterly in key operational parameters like: CAC, NRR, Operational and Capital Efficiencies. Benchmarker provides marketing benchmarks to help you evaluate your company’s performance against similar businesses, at a very granular level. With a continuous tracking study, companies can track performance against industry standards for a wide range of measures, including: Budgets and spending, Display and search advertising, Web analytics, Email marketing, Lead generation, Content marketing, and Paid and organic social.
🤝 Achieve Alignment: One of the most important things the CMO needs to do is to drive alignment across sales and marketing, GTM and the entire executive team. Alignment is never a one and done thing. In my experience as a 5x CMO, staying in alignment is something you have to work on with others in the C-suite and every other stakeholder you are aiming to influence.
While it takes extra effort to forge and reinforce getting on the same page, the investment will pay off when you share performance numbers and the expectations have already been set for what good looks like. Major change initiatives of course require additional effort or resources to bring to fruition, but when it comes to metrics, you have to get agreement on what hitting the mark actually means.
💡Leverage Insights: one of the most important tasks for any CMO is understand the industry, your customers, your prospects, your competitors and key market trends, and to analyze data patterns to uncover insights to better inform your hypotheses and help you make better decisions, faster to drive the business forward. When it comes to marketing performance, I find it’s critical to track the response and returns of every marketing investment, so that you can constantly refine and adapt to determine what works best, what to do more of, and what to stop doing, with the goal to optimize marketing performance and maximize your contribution to the company’s success.
🎯Create Differentiation: almost anyone can create content, campaigns, and communications. In my experience, however, most of this content and messaging is generic, bland and mired in a in a sea of sameness that fails to distinguish your brand, your value proposition, and your message from your key competitors. You need to find ways to truly differentiate your company, your brand, and your offering so that you can stand out, be noticed, drive engagement, build pipeline, and enhance your overall Marketing performance.
🌟Elevate Brand: when everyone who sells technology solutions says they’re AI-powered, have the best features, yada yada, you need to develop a comprehensive brand strategy that communicates a distinct brand purpose, and also eate and enhance your brand identity and personality. I have found that this is a great area to bring in outside expertise to galvanize all stakeholders around a differentiated brand promise. When I was CMO of Emburse (late 2019 to early 2023), we launched the brand with a purpose to ”humanize work.” This simple phrase broke through the competitive clutter, connected us to our customers in a meaningful way (especially during COVID), inspired and retained our staff, and helped us build greater brand attraction and loyalty over time.
🎨Inspire Creativity: with so much marketing technology (including GenAI) frameworks, tools and templates, it’s easy to structure and implement marketing campaigns and programs. What’s hard is making them stand out, appear different, and have more impact than what everyone else is doing. What I found works is to have both internal and external creative teams and partners who understand that ingenuity, creativity and novelty are as important as all the mechanics involved in deploying, monitoring and measuring marketing campaigns.
✨Upscale Talent: over the course of my career, I’ve developed a strong bias towards upscaling whatever team I’ve inherited. There are a lot of reasons why certain individuals don’t keep pace with company growth, or just simply need a change, and your impact at any given organization is directly correlated with the collective talent you can hire, grow, and retain. I’m an athlete and a striver who is never satisfied, and always trying to get better, and I look for individuals with that same drive and desire to improve and deliver outstanding results.
🆘Seek Help: the role of the CMO is as demanding as any other in the C-suite. Marketing has more heterogeneous sub-functions that require so much energy, attention and effort to manage, it is no wonder that many of my peers often feel exhausted. That’s why I feel it’s essential to bring in outside help whenever needed, to get additional bandwidth, new thinking, and an outside perspective you can rely on as a sounding board and a trusted advisor to help you achieve your goals faster, and with better outcomes. Whether in your first 90 days, the start of a new quarter, or planning for the next fiscal year, get a human co-pilot to speed the path to success.
🚀Boost Performance: I have a very simple philosophy that became an ingrained way of working when I first became a CMO 15 years ago. I call it the “ROI of everything.” I think we’re in the permanent era of relentlessly driving down costs, driving up performance and optimizing the marketing mix. That’s why I insist that my teams measure everything determine what works and why and what doesn’t and stop doing those things and doing more of what works best.
🔄 Continually Improve: while most leaders I know are driven, restless, and never satisfied, I think what sets the best ones apart is a relentless desire to continually improve, raise the bar, hit new records, and find innovative and systematic ways to drive better performance across the entire organization over time. If you adopt a mindset that anything and everything can be refined and improved, it’s likely you’ll find some things that you thought were doing well that weren’t, and other things that you thought had reached their peak, but haven’t. Keep at it!
Over the past several months, I’ve been doing a baseline diagnostic for many marketing leaders and peers, and in every case, the numbers tell a story and suggest many new avenues to improve performance. If you’re interested in a free diagnostic to see how your marketing and company performance compares to industry benchmarks, just send me a note and we can schedule a call. It takes about an hour to compile your confidential score, and you’ll get the calculation sheet to track your own measurements going forward. Happy improving!
CMO Mentor 