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Marketing executives face a constant stream of pressures—pressure to accommodate customers, business pressure from executives to meet corporate goals, and pressure for virtuosity in performing key marketing functions. Customer expectations are increasing and satisfaction is becoming increasingly difficult to reign in as customers today have more and more choices, and more channels through which to purchase. In addition, there is increasing uncertainty stemming from converging sales, marketing, and distribution channels. These pressures to find the smoothest path to the bottom line, and utilize the technologies that best integrate all the customer data collected at each point and channel of customer interaction, are omnipresent. Best-in-class companies enjoy a performance advantage over their peers in understanding not only who their customers are, but what type of relationship their customers want with them (Figure i). Aberdeen believes product commoditization, higher customer expectations, and growing global competition, along with multiple sales, marketing, and distribution channels, have pressured marketers into developing a dynamic, flexible customer-responsive, marketing-ready infrastructure, and to answer tough questions to ensure their personal success:
- How do I plan and budget to win customer purchasing dollars?
- How do I decide on the optimal mix of products, services, price points, or promotions?
- How do I demonstrate the value marketing programs are having on other metrics?
- How do I gather, integrate, and apply the collected data?
- How do I ensure our team continually improves?
- How do I show the impact of our efforts?
Key Business Value Findings
Aberdeen benchmarked 589 companies to gain insight into the “marketing-ready” enterprise. Our research demonstrated that marketing-ready companies successfully bring together a closed-loop approach using the right metrics, differentiating capabilities, and more integrated and sophisticated technologies.
This research revealed that best-in-class marketers consistently demonstrate higher performance across KEY business and marketing metrics, they also measure specific metrics that directly link marketing efforts and overall business goals. Further examination of these top performers reveals core marketing capabilities, such as customer profitability modeling, centralized knowledge and data management, and tracking customer behavior, that effectively enhance marketing performance and enable marketers to better respond to current customer pressures.
Technologies that will yield best-in-class results must enable integration of data and enhance sophistication of marketing processes in order to add value.
Aberdeen finds that companies adopting these practices position their company to be market-ready. For CMOs, market-readiness should mean that the marketing function is poised to meet the four core marketing competencies (Figure ii).
Recommendations for Action
This Aberdeen research, which reflects a strong cross section of various industries as well as the upper mid-market and SMB segments, clearly demonstrated that marketing-ready companies adopt a closed-loop, lifecycle marketing process that successfully brings together the right metrics, differentiating capabilities, and integrated and sophisticated technologies (Figure iii). By reconfiguring your marketing processes to this lifecycle model, your company will not only be able to meet marketing and business pressures and challenges, but will develop “marketing-readiness” that will elevate your ability to answer the four marketing competencies. Our research has found that companies that adopt advanced marketing-ready practices are more than three times as likely to report a greater than 50% ROMI than those that do not. In addition, Best-in-class companies that reported an increase of at least 50% in gross annual revenues outnumbered their counterparts by two to one.
As demonstrated by the best-in-class companies that practice them, the capabilities that a closed-loop process encompasses help elevate performance in four core competencies of marketing. Aberdeen’s model of core marketing competencies consists of driving market awareness, creating demand, growing customers, and accelerating sales. These core competencies are not new (Figure 1). What is new are the complex multi-channel processes, dynamic interactions, extended integration, and leverage of customer information, and increased use of sophisticated technologies required to successfully deploy them.
Companies serious about building a marketing-ready enterprise will need to rethink how they create processes around customer interactions and how they invest in technologies that support advanced, rules-based communications. Best-in-class companies enjoy a performance advantage over their peers in understanding not only who their customers are, but what type of relationship their customers want with them (Figure i).
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