It’s incremental lift: the sales your company generates every year due to all forms of marketing communications.
Or put another way, the sales your company would lose if you stopped marcom.
Based on Navigation’s experience in measuring this, for some companies, that number could be over 50% of sales.
Think about the importance to your company of marketing in that context.
But to be credible, your source must be a model that meets or exceeds best practices; it must be:
- Developed around measures the C suite finds meaningful such as sales, and NOT around vanity metrics that have no clear relationship to business success. The C suite must see clearly how this model supports their goals.
- Includes data on all, or at least the most important, factors that shape business outcomes. Certainly paid media, but owned and earned as well. And factors that may shape outcomes even if not under a CMO’s control such as weather or economic changes.
- Is accurate; a proven ability to explain over 90% of variation in outcome measures over the most recent 3 year period.
- Is actionable; you can then demonstrate what to do to improve outcomes, or what would happen if a bad decision were taken
- Tested in market and shown to produce recommendations that lead to demonstrably better results.
Imagine your relationship with the C suite with this knowledge in place:
- Imagine a C suite that respects the practice of marketing instead of disparaging it or treating it as an expense taken reluctantly.
- Imagine a C suite that is looking to help expand the impact of marketing, instead of reflexively cutting marketing budgets in hard times.
- Imagine the effect such knowledge has on your own team, and the pride taken by knowing how important their work is to the health of their company.
- Imagine the confidence that comes with making a clear contribution and being appreciated for it.
- Imagine how much easier budget approvals would be with the full team aligned behind this metric.
- Imagine being a valued C suite team member and a driver of growth.
- Imagine measuring incremental sales properly, socializing that finding to the C suite, and then updating it regularly.