Chief Marketing Officer, Infosys. Sharing ideas to balance the science of marketing effectiveness with the art of humanizing the brand.

There isn’t a marketer among us who doesn’t remember the four P’s of marketing — product, price, place and promotion. And yet if we stopped to recollect and recount the work we are proudest of executing in the past year — that map to each of the P’s — many of us would be stumped about all of them except for promotion. We have honed the art and science of promotion. But this mastery, in many cases, seems to have come at a price — we have lost sight of the three other P’s that various different functions in our organizations have now either partly or entirely claimed. For example, it is often sales or product teams, not marketing, that play a driving role in determining price. Meanwhile, marketers — who are schooled to deliver on all of these fronts — can collaborate with these functions to bring home value from the forgotten P’s. But I believe the need of the hour is for marketers to focus on a whole new P: performance marketing.

Performance marketing is where marketing outcomes directly influence business outcomes. After all, business leaders are increasingly turning to us to help elevate their brands to accelerate growth, and that ask comes with the need for both support and latitude. To be able to deliver on the demand to drive growth, we marketers should redirect our energy toward delivering on goals that matter to the business. We should be armed with a clearer understanding of the customer as well as better insights into strategies and campaigns that work and those that don’t. Here are some practical steps we can take:

Integrate data and insights across touchpoints to drive marketing decisions.

Myopia from focusing on data only from late-funnel stages, as well as relying on historical data and insufficiently granular data, can keep us from building effective marketing campaigns. Today, we already have access to sophisticated algorithms that can help us understand customer behavior in real time. However, this intelligence may exist across disparate systems. It makes sense for marketing to orchestrate organizational synergies to create a shared digital foundation for the company. We, for example, have led an effort to integrate technology across marketing, sales and operations to create one sentient tech stack that captures data to generate intelligence from both internal and external systems. An expert team oversees the integrity of the data and offers us all a single source of truth. As a result, we are now able to better manage marketing investments, drive more effective marketing and offer better support to our colleagues in sales.

Build agile operations, agile experiments and agile learning methodologies.

Marketers often quote this one-liner: “Half the money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is we don’t know which half.” With the evolution of channels and marketing technology, this can surely become a thing of the past. The challenge, however, is to not just establish which marketing dollar is actually working and which is not but also to enable our teams to do so quickly, make rapid tactical decisions and take advantage of learnings to improve existing campaigns while exploring new ones. Rigor in tracking ROI, backed by a best-in-class marketing tech stack, can help marketers with the groundwork of bringing clarity to measures and metrics. But along with this, we marketers should pursue an equally rigorous test-and-learn routine to ensure that new insights based on changes in messaging and channels feed into our performance marketing programs.

Stick your neck out. Speak their language.

When marketers do a good job, they commit to driving holistic value for the business — both in the short- and medium-term. One approach to ensure that value is delivered is to rely on a value framework that focuses on how factors like brand preference, awareness and consideration create long-term business impact, as well as the strategies marketers can use to create a more immediate impact. This involves a journey of marketing-qualified leads becoming sales-accepted leads, then moving into the sales pipeline and generating revenue. So, this two-pronged strategy is all about brand and business impact. And that’s just the first part. The other important aspect is to take on goals that matter to the business and report metrics on the same corporate scorecard as every other function. The challenge is to get out of the marketing comfort zone of familiar metrics that few others understand and to speak the language that makes sense to a broader executive audience. For example, an attempt to convince the C-suite about the value of digital impressions will almost certainly prove futile. However, if we can find a way to articulate this concept as it relates to the top and bottom lines, we can better demonstrate the value of this marketing metric.

Complement your creators with analysts.

Moving away from vanity marketing metrics to deliver on commercial metrics means clearly understanding what causes that drop or uptick in performance, how needs vary by customer segment and how effective a promotion is. Performance marketing is about combining creativity and intuition with outcomes that indicate the intended result in tangible terms that help hone programs and make sense to executive leadership. Without complementing creator talent pools with analyst talent pools, we risk doing great marketing and failing to communicate it in empirical terms — or reporting meaningfully but missing out on the untapped potential to push the boundaries of branding and marketing.

Start with making sure the C-suite understands how marketing is driving growth, orchestrating and utilizing data to steer the function to serve the company’s broader goals, making sure marketing is continuously honed for effectiveness, driving short- and long-term outcomes that are measurable and making a clearly perceivable impact on the business. That’s the holy grail of performance marketing. It is not about reducing promotion efforts or minimizing creative leaps. It’s all about orienting all of that investment toward the end goal — performance marketing. Performance marketing also offers an opportunity for us all to raise our teams’ aspirations and to be counted among those who deliver true value and growth for our companies.


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