Marketers often brag about understanding external customers. They often do this while ignoring internal customers. To be a great marketer understanding the end consumer isn’t enough. Having a “marketing state of mind” means trying to solve the problems of your internal customers. Why is that?
Internal Customers Of Marketers
Imagine a simplified firm: the accountants allocate resources and the marketers spend the money. The accountants are internal customers of the marketer. They need the marketer’s information to effectively allocate resources. The accountant, therefore, asks what the marketing plan will cost and achieve. Marketers often respond it’ll cost $X. They add something like but you can’t measure the results.
What happens next? The accountant creates an arbitrary number for the marketing budget. Then, the marketer complains that the accountant didn’t listen. Budgeting becomes a random process. It is dependent upon the accountant’s whims. As a former accountant, I’ll defend the accountant. What else is the accountant supposed to do? With no proper information, whims seem as good as anything. Budgeting happens with or without marketer input.
Measuring Marketing Is Imperfect But Necessary
Measuring marketing is, of course, imperfect. Still, the accountants must compare projects to decide which to fund. Remember whenever there are limited resources, i.e. in every organization, someone implicitly ranks plans when allocating resources. This is budgeting. It is the art of turning a strategy into numbers. It is best for a marketer to own the marketing plan’s numbers. Still, if marketers don’t provide numbers someone else will, at least implicitly. Saying you can’t measure marketing shows no appreciation of the needs of your internal customers. You can’t complain if an accountant makes some apparently random allocations if you don’t give them anything to work with.
Yes, marketing numbers are often rough. They are never perfect. Recognizing this doesn’t mean they are useless. Imperfect numbers improve with use. Plus, you must start somewhere. If you want perfect before you act you will never act.
metrics are rarely perfect. Yet the volume of data available today should make it possible to find metrics and analytic opportunities that take advantage of your unique insights, are understood and trusted by your top team, provide proof of progress, and lay a foundation for more sophisticated approaches to tracking marketing ROI in the future.
Court, Gordon and Perrey, 2012
Display A Marketing State Of Mind
My advice: Refusing to try to measure marketing shows no appreciation of your internal customers. If a marketer won’t even try to measure what they achieve they don’t have a marketing state of mind. I wouldn’t hire that person as a marketer.
For more on measuring marketing see here. For more on working with accountants see here.
Read: David Court, Jonathan Gordon, and Jesko Perrey, Measuring Marketing’s Worth, May 2012, McKinsey Quarterly