Why Smart Marketers Are Now Viewing Their Communications Efforts As A Systemic Process
In today’s marketing world CEO’s are demanding accountability from all aspects of their CMO’s marketingcommunications efforts. Last year, we fielded a survey among a number of C level and senior marketing executives. Eighty-one percent report that marketing is taking on a more important role in delivering bottom line results for their organization, thereby suggesting a shift in CEO expectations of the traditional roles of sales versus marketing. Due to this shift, 64% of CEO’s are looking for much greater accountability from marketing spending.
This new environment is having a disruptive effect on the traditional approach to marketing where the focus has been on launching a campaign for the upcoming fiscal year and then waiting until next year to begin anew.
Marketers are no longer thinking about their communications efforts as one with a beginning and an end. Instead the need for ongoing measurement and new software tools (that actually can provide real time analysis) is allowing savvy marketers for the first time to treat marketing as a systemic process.
In this new dynamic - in addition to developing a cogent creative strategy and campaign - every element of the campaign is measured, analyzed, and optimized against the initial campaign goals including: individual messages and creative elements, unpaid and paid media channels, overall strategy, and target market segments.
How do you -as a marketer - do this? That will be the subject of my next several submissions as we discuss and review the process behind the implementation of a systemic marketing communications program.
