The New 4 A’s of Marketing: A Call for Accountability

Hold yourself accountable before someone else does

During my last post, I covered the first new A of marketing, Agility. Today’s post will cover the notion of Accountability.

Traditionally, marketing has been viewed as a cost center, rather than a revenue generating machine. And when called to account for their budgets and performance, the traditional marketer may have shrugged their shoulders.

Marketers of the world, gone are the days of shrugging your shoulders, repeating the famous John Wanamaker quote and laughing it off like you don’t have a care in the world. For those of you unfamiliar with the quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

No disrespect to John Wanamaker. He did, after all, hire the first full-time copywriter in history! However, an increase in marketing budgets requires an increase in responsibility. My dear old-school marketer: your days are numbered. It’s time to make the CFO your new BFF. According to Gartner, leaders in marketing are securing larger budgets. Much of this is for digital marketing, but much of this spend will be allocated on marketing technologies. Consequently, the need prove value is ever increasing.

All Paths Point to Attribution

The marketing hero has the opportunity to demonstrate Accountability by measuring and reporting on her progress. By showing conversions. By proving revenue uplift. By justifying Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).

This is not an easy feat. Marketers have been discussing performance measurement, marketing metrics and attribution for years.

ROMI Means All Channels, Not One

New research from webmarketing123 and compiled by eMarketer blew me away: 38% of marketers do not leverage an attribution model. What?

Even more interesting: a majority of marketers that DO have an attribution model in place are only considering last touch, first touch, or first and last touch. The customer journey is not something that your average marketer has wrapped her arms (or head?) around today.

There may be a business or two out there that operate via a single channel. But I’m hard pressed to come up with one right now. So, marketers, if your customer is on a journey, multi-channel, omni-channel and digital, your measurement plan needs to be too. And you need to prove it works.

Cross-channel attribution is the best way to show your CFO that you are Accountable. That you know exactly the cost of customer acquisition (CAC). That you need X budget to achieve Y revenues. And then, impress him even more by exceeding those goals.

Be Accountable. Be a Hero.

Next time, I’ll cover the third A of new marketing: Appropriate.