It’s no secret that marketing leaders and their organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their value to their businesses, especially in today’s tough economic environment; the effectiveness of marketing efforts can prove the key differentiator in highly competitive markets.

So, what sets successful marketing organizations apart from their less successful peers?  To learn more, join us for our webinar The Marketing Performance Advantage on February 25 where we will share best practices in measuring and managing Marketing Performance that we uncovered from a study among over 400 CFO, CEO and marketing leaders.

The objective of Marketing Performance Measurement and Management is:

To build the marketing organization’s capabilities to measure, learn from, and improve upon marketing strategies and tactics over time — with the goal of ultimately delivering improved business results.

By studying the responses of organizations that are experiencing a positive impact to their business from their Marketing Performance practices, we were able to identify five key best practices.

To learn more, join us for our webinar The Marketing Performance Advantage on February 25 where we will share best practices that we uncovered from a study among over 400 CFO, CEO and marketing employees of companies with 100+ employees interested in measuring the performance of their marketing initiatives.

There is no question that the science of marketing has grown in importance over the last decade. Just in the last few years, advances in the science of marketing measurement as well as significant changes in communications mediums have transformed the function of marketing and the measurement of its impact on the business. Over the same period, marketing departments are under increasing pressure to defend budgets and more clearly articulate the value they are creating for the organization. The result has been a seismic shift towards the science of marketing and an explosion of interest in marketing measurement.

But has the result been a corresponding improvement in business results?

We found that many of the 400 organizations we surveyed appear to be stuck in the basic tracking and measuring stage of improving marketing effectiveness. And an almost equal number are focused on breaking down barriers to improved performance in areas such as the correlation of measurements and data or incorporating insights into the decision-making process.

We also found that those companies who have fully embraced the concept of Marketing Performance Management have seen a more positive impact by the marketing organization on the business and in turn are more likely to be market leaders. By studying these top-performing companies, we were able to uncover a series of best practices that can be translated across a wide array of organizations to help drive business results.

To learn more, join us for our webinar The Marketing Performance Advantage on February 25 where we will share best practices in measuring and managing Marketing Performance that we uncovered from a study among over 400 CFO, CEO and marketing leaders.

In this special issue of Perspectives, our e-newsletter, get an advanced look at the forthcoming findings gained through two in-depth research studies CMG Partners conducted among more than 450 companies.

CMO 2.0 — Part II of our series on The CMO’s Agenda
This new round of in-depth conversations with 30 additional Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) reveals the need to redefine the role of the lead marketer. But in order for CMOs to reach this more elevated and transformational role they must be willing to forsake many previously accepted practices and assume greater accountability.

The Marketing Performance Advantage
This landmark survey of more than 400 companies uncovers some of the key attributes of successful marketing organizations and the practices they employ. Those companies that excel at marketing performance management are reaping the rewards by taking a more holistic approach to improvement; both measuring AND managing their marketing performance.

CMO tenure is a common topic in our world of strategic marketing consulting and we recently formulated a few thoughts around why we believe this phenomenon exists.

Based on our experiences and perspectives we believe that marketing leaders often focus their energies and expertise on winning in the marketplace and fail to recognize the critical linkage between a strong internal foundation and the ability to execute effectively externally.

To help bring this to life, a colleague used the analogy of being tasked to round up marbles in the center of a room with an uneven floor…an unending, maddening task that will lead to nowhere fast.

In an effort to help marketing leaders diagnose the strength of their foundation and ultimately improve their tenure we propose four areas for marketing leaders to evaluate:

1. strategic alignment,
2. performance measures,
3. management buy-in,
4. and asset leverage.

For more information on these areas and our thinking on the topic please read our article  How Solid is Your Foundation?: Addressing CMO Tenure.

It’s hard not to notice the number of marketing jobs being eliminated across the country, the hesitancy of companies to add critical staff, and the massive amount of work trying to be absorbed by the remaining team members. Worse yet, the morale of the people left in marketing department dwindles as they fear job security, and have more work to get done in the same hours of the day. The largest impact on the organization though, is the inability to capture on growth opportunities with reduced staff and reduced budgets. Marketing is afterall a key source of growth for companies. And as I noted in an earlier posting, now is the time to invest in marketing - not lose your voice in the market.

So, how are marketing departments getting the work done to drive growth?

First off, they are prioritizing. Not all initiatives are created equal, and with fewer hands to do the work, more focus is being spent on picking the few “right initiatives” to generate growth. Second, they are making important investment decisions - shifting budgets to marketing tactics they feel will yield the biggest bang for the buck. Third, they are outsourcing marketing, but for short periods of time, as needed. Companies with headcount pressure are finding relief through temporary marketing support to help deliver against their core marketing initiatives, and manage the natural ebb and flow of their marketing needs - all without having to hire.

We have seen through our clients a need for on-demand access to a team of seasoned marketing professionals who can help them develop and deliver marketing programs, when needed, for as short or as long as needed. So we developed CMGP OnDemand - access to our team, our diverse skill set, our marketing expertise to address immediate marketing needs. Think of it as an on-call marketing department.

From our perspective there are two simple truths for businesses in this economic environment:

1. Cash is king and tough investment and cost cutting decisions need to be made.

2. The source of your business’ cash flow is your existing customer base. 

For marketing leaders this translates to the need to be your customers champion and challenge the organization to make smart, informed investment and cost cutting decisions that include a customer’s perspective.

For more information on common steps that marketing leaders can take to approach this challenge read our article, “In a Tough Economy, Go to Battle for your Customers“, recently published on MarketingProfs.

A recent study performed by ANA showed that 71% of marketers report budget decreases for 2009.  Now I’m not an economist nor do I pretend to be one but I would like to think that the stock market’s performance this week is a signal that we have seen the bottom of this economic recession.  Unfortunately due to the domino effect that is taking place in the market, near term demand will most likely continue to suffer and what this means for most marketing leaders is a second, maybe third round of budget cuts is coming down the pipe.

While this is the reality for marketing leaders, now more than ever is the time for marketing leaders to be the voice of reason and truly be the chief customer officer to ensure that investment and cost cutting decisions have your organization’s customers in mind.  If a company is not careful it may perpetuate a business “death spiral” where cost cutting impacts customer satisfaction and demand, which in turn impact top-line revenue creating the need for yet further cost cutting.  As the name alludes to, this downward spiral typically results in difficult position for any business to re-emerge from and can be avoided by maintaining a customer perspective during these trying times.

For more information on common steps that marketing leaders can take to address this challenge check out our article, Go to Battle for Your Customers. 

Last year we published a point of view (POV) titled The Path to Marketing Performance.  The genesis for this POV stemmed from two common needs that were highlighted in our conversations with existing and prospective clients:

1. How to best to approach implementing marketing performance practices.
2. How to best to approach improving existing marketing performance practices.

To address these needs we laid out what we believe to be a simple but effective approach to gaining traction with marketing performance practices.

With the current economic environment and associated challenges businesses and marketers are facing one may question if now is the right time to focus on marketing performance?  Our humble opinion is the need to understand and improve upon the performance of marketing investments has never been greater.  The combination of less disposable income in the marketplace coupled with reduced marketing budgets requires that marketers make the most out of the limited funding they have. 

And a parting note of caution to marketing executives, once the economy rebounds marketing budgets won’t be reset to historical spend levels; you will have to justify each incremental investment.