Understanding marketing effectiveness maturity

Understanding marketing effectiveness in all its complexity, let alone successfully measuring it, is a challenge for the industry, but new research from Kantar and Google identifies several levels of marketing effectiveness maturity that can help organisations better succeed in the task. 

Why marketing effectiveness matters

Marketing effectiveness has become an important focus as budgets come under pressure. In Kantar’s latest Media Reactions survey, ‘improving marketing effectiveness’ was ranked marketers’ top priority, ahead of understanding audiences and growing/defending sales.

The Kantar/Google research*, outlined in Marketing Week, sets out three stages of marketing effectiveness maturity – Establishing, Developing and Advanced – and suggests that organisations can use this framework to chart their own course.

Three characteristics of advanced maturity 

• These businesses combine multiple evaluation tools – typically twice as many as ‘establishing’ organisations – to create a ‘blended’, holistic approach. As well as utilising digital attribution and econometrics, they experiment with new methods and integrate brand measurement metrics to better understand long-term impact.
• There’s an ‘effectiveness first, efficiency second’ mindset. ROI remains an important metric, but it’s used alongside others, again in a blended approach that considers diverse factors such as media delivery and impact, digital performance and brand metrics.
• Organisational culture is more joined up. Advanced organisations are five times more likely to agree that there is alignment between marketing and other parts of the business on how to assess marketing effectiveness, which can mean different things to different teams. 

*Research included a quantitative survey of 450 European marketing leaders and a number of in-depth qualitative interviews.

Sourced from Marketing Week