The Elements of Marketing Operational Excellence Part III: A Process for Measurement, Refinement and Optimization

This post is the third part of a five part series on the elements of marketing operational excellence. In case you missed it, you should check out the first article here: A Strategy-Based and Goal-Driven Planning Approach and our second article here: A Complete Marketing System View

Some context on the series

In a recent blog post, we discussed the impact of ineffective marketing leadership execution. But if the impact of ineffective marketing leadership execution is so high, why don’t more people try to solve the problem? In most cases, the issue is not a lack of effort, but the lack of all of the core elements required for operational marketing excellence.

When these elements are combined, a marketing organization can get much closer to its true potential. A single missing component can throw everything in the entire system off. The marketing leader in an organization needs to operate like the conductor of an orchestra, the NASA mission commander, or even a classroom teacher in charge of wrangling a bunch of adolescents.

These organizations and systems all require the following:

• A strategy-based and goal-driven planning approach
• A complete system view
• A process for marketing measurement, refinement, and optimization
• The discipline to connect all activities to outcomes
• A culture of excellence

In this post, we explore the third of these five elements in detail.

There are two primary issues we often see with marketing metrics and dashboards: either they lack context and don’t have any targets and milestones, or nobody looks at them at all. A key to operational success is a process and regular set of reviews that focus on the “So what?” that comes from the data.

To facilitate the review of relevant data, we recommend that you schedule a series of focused meetings with the appropriate stakeholders to review the data in question. When reviewing metrics, the data should be presented with a comparison to their targets, milestones, and operating ranges (where appropriate).

8 meetings that should be part of every marketing leader’s process

 

Meeting	Purpose	Stakeholders	Frequency
Goal progress reviews	Monitor the progress toward achieving goals	Owner of the goal outcome and any underlying campaign owners	Monthly (bi-weekly for higher-velocity businesses)
Plan review	Review the aggregate performance against all the goals	Individual goal owners	Monthly
Marketing system review	Review the presence and operating range for all marketing systems. Highlight areas that are outside expected performance	Marketing leadership	Monthly (or quarterly)
Market scan	Review any changes to the external market conditions, competition, or major industry shifts	Marketing and product management	Quarterly or when a major market event happens
Budget review and refinement	Review committed spend, budget burn rate (BBR), forecast of spend vs. plan, and plan accruals	Marketing budget owners and finance team	Monthly (or bi-weekly for higher velocity businesses)
Campaign reviews	Review campaign performance vs. expectations for campaigns in flight, determine whether to repeat or refine	Marketing leadership, campaign owners	Monthly or on completion of major campaign
Quarterly business reviews	Report on progress vs. expected results for entire plan, marketing system review status, and campaign performance review summary	Marketing and business leadership	Quarterly
Strategy review	Assess marketing strategy effectiveness and make recommendations for adjustments	Marketing and business leadership	Semi-annually

This may seem like a lot of meetings, but they are important elements of an operationally excellent marketing process. And if you are part of a small team, you can incorporate several of these reviews into the same meeting.

Many marketing teams meet regularly for generic status meetings. If that is the case, you can turn your meetings into a much more productive investment of your time with a purposeful agenda. Using a meeting web-based meeting minutes software can help your marketing team stay organized while streamlining the meeting process and improving meeting productivity.

 

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