thefunnel

Most B-2-B marketing is all about the marketing contribution to achieve a business objective. Often there’s a high emphasis on easy to measure direct contributions such as collateral (brochures, catalogs, etc.) leads, visits, responses or new names, and not much weight is given to marketing “influencers” such as brand equity, awareness, loyalty, etc. (although these can be more valuable for the success of a business in the long run). The reason for this is simply because some things are easier to measure than others, and the short term focus of many companies leads to a very tactical approach. For many marketers, digital marketing has been great, with more measurable things, but the marketing contribution problem still remains, because yes there are more things to measure, but yes they are still very tactical or activity based rather than based on a real outcome. Why am I writing this? Here’s why. The bigger problem as I see it is that the business environment is changing and most of the “generic and measurable” marketing contributions are showing a diminishing return. For example: email marketing response rates are going down, trade show participation is down, most companies are catching on to search and web marketing, so the way in which marketing used to show its (tactical) business contribution is soon no longer being there, and yet, not much emphasis is being put onto measuring the indirect contribution of marketing. What can a marketer do, to avoid going back to be just a servant of sales and a production house for brochures and flyers?