Why measuring marketing performance is important

- You're the chief marketing officer, that's a huge responsibility. You lead the commercial activity of your company that's at the hub of everything else that happens. Product development, sales, pricing, manufacturing, advertising, and so on, a big job, for sure. Let's assume you've surrounded yourself with a team of eight players, people with talent and ambition. You have the resources to put your team's plan in the motion. You have capable and aligned partners both internally and externally to help you just blow it out of the water. Everything is looking great. Then something bad happens. A key customer decides not to renew their contract with you. Market share seems to be slipping away, customer complaints are on the rise. One of your top sales reps defects to the competition, social media traffic seems to be more negative, even worse, your boss, the CEO, seems doubtful, is this company headed in the right direction? Without a clear set of indicators to answer that question, you're flying the airplane blind. What's my heading, my airspeed, my altitude? Heck I don't even know how many passengers I have in the back of the plane or how much they paid for their ticket, or how happy they are with our brand. But wait, I thought we did a great job, we delivered what we promised, what's going on here? Why all these problems all of a sudden? The problem is that you're measuring the things that don't really matter to the success of your firm. You're probably measuring things because you have a ton of data about those things. You're blind to the things that really matter. We need to change that. Metrics matter as long as you do the following. One, you measure the right things. Two, you measure them the right way. Three, you measure them often enough. And most importantly, four, you do something about it after you measure it. Well, here's the good news, you already have a metrics mindset. You use metrics every day in your personal life. You couldn't function without them. You just have to transfer that metrics mindset from your personal life into your professional marketing life. Think about the things you measure in your life, your wellbeing and happiness, your body weight, how fast you're driving your car, your credit score, your job performance, your number of Facebook friends, look around you and you'll see you're taking measurements pretty much all the time, it's how we live our lives. And it's what we do to adjust and change aspects of our lives to improve. That's what marketing performance analytics is all about. Measure the right things the right way with the right frequency, and then be prepared to do something about it. Metrics are critical to your success as a chief marketing officer, you better hope that your counterpart at the competition is not doing a better job with metrics. If they are, they'll win in the long run. Let's make sure that doesn't happen.