Marketing is a cost, right? A budget you allocate against an activity plan?
Sounds very typical, but it's the wrong mindset. For two reasons.
First, Executive leaders need to ensure they’ve hired the expertise to create the marketing strategy – one that directly builds the bridge between business ambition, purpose and marketing plan. Objectives. This is very different from a marketing plan with lots of activity, but one that stands alone. Disconnected.
Second, marketing teams need to do more to demonstrate the value of what they do. Many report on activity with some ad-hoc highlights. There needs to be a dashboard to evidence progress across the board.
So, let’s look at how we turn the cost centre perception on its head – let’s talk about strategy, measurement, and how to ensure Marketing is viewed as an investment. Joined at the hip with business success.
Start with the narrow end of the sales funnel and work back.
An organisation can quickly identify a strike rate for new business. The ratio of leads to sales. If not, there are typical assumptions that can be made. We can get a view on a typical timeline from lead to success, and average value. So, we can predict pipeline health, and in turn we work out how many leads need to be generated from prospecting and marketing activity.
Marketing can measure all sorts of metrics – from allocated spend through the multiple stage-points in the journey to success (cost per impression, per click, per lead to name a few). RoI.
All sounds quite straightforward, but what about the bit where you build brand awareness, credibility and inherent trust, and how do we measure the spend (or organic activity) v impact.
Typically, a Marketing Director will allocate a split percentage of their spend to brand awareness and revenue generation. That split will depend on the business maturity.
You can’t sell your solutions at scale if the market has never heard of you. There needs to be awareness of who you are, what you believe and what you do – this builds inherent trust, and an openness to engage.
The image is an extract from a 1950’s advert for a business magazine publisher - but despite it's age, it still holds true today!
Let's look at FinTech marketing measurement from the brand build activity through to the revenue generation activity.
A good solution is to categorise marketing reporting dashboard against the three stages of a buying funnel. This helps stakeholders understand the bigger picture - and not just how many leads are coming in. This is a universe, so we know that not everyone is a prospect - a principle that applies throughout the funnel. Thats why targeting your audience is so important.
See is brand visibility – for example press coverage, advertising, social media or a trade event. At this point there is no direct engagement between prospect and the brand, so whilst prospects are aware, you don’t have any information on them at this stage. It’s straightforward to measure event attendees, press coverage or social media impressions for example.
Think is where engagement starts – perhaps visitors to your stand at a trade show, or social media followers (or better still, engaging with content), clicking through to read a blog article or web site analytics. Sometimes you can capture contact details, sometimes not.
Do is where the prospect makes a more identifiable move, signing up for a webinar or downloading gated content for example. From the point data is captured, CRM can score prospect activity (another measurable metric) – when it reaches a threshold, or a lead comes in, success can be declared. Sales can engage direct.
With all this information captured on a dashboard, marketing can quickly become seen as value add.
This is good news for marketing, but it's better news for Executive leaders, as it helps them to see further into the distance, informing key strategic decisions on the direction of travel.
We’ve provided a simple template to help you kick start the process.
If you need someone to help you shape your marketing strategy, or build out a measurement dashboard, one of our GTM HIVE Fintech SaaS fractional experts can help you. Check out our available expert and their rates now.
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