Measuring the performance of marketing campaigns: much more than a simple monitoring exercise

 In its latest study with marketing professionals, BearingPoint provides an overview of the major trends in data, KPIs, dashboards, and governance, offering CMOs lessons on measuring and getting the most out of their marketing campaigns.

High management expectations: 70% of CEOs are expecting CMOs to lead revenue growth in 2020. Budget reductions: 76% of CMOs anticipate more budget cuts in the coming years. Marketing teams are increasingly challenged on the business impact of their activity. This is especially prevalent when it comes to marketing campaigns which constitute, on average, 65% of investment budgets. This pressure has increased with the current health crisis.

To cope with this pressure and the uncertainties caused by COVID-19, marketing managers must adapt their marketing mix. A readjustment which requires, from organizations, to put under control performance measurement. Nevertheless, 71% of CMOs in our study mention that their company is not mature enough in campaign performance measurement.

To meet this need, BearingPoint conducted a study with marketing professionals on measuring and optimizing the performance of marketing campaigns through an online survey, interviews with Marketing and Data directors, customer experiences and experts feedback.

The study enabled BearingPoint to identify current practices, highlight the weaknesses that professionals face and provide an overview of major trends in terms of data, KPIs, dashboards and governance.

The study highlights the main lessons around 4 major themes:

1. The importance for organizations to regain control of campaign performance

2. Identifying best practices and the methodology to effectively measure performance around

• Data mining: 77% of marketing experts place data as the major pain point for successful campaign performance measurement
• KPIs to follow: too many indicators that are not aligned between the teams which constitute the second pain point for 62% of marketing professionals
• Governance: 50% of marketing experts consider team involvement as the 3rd key success factor for an effective and successful performance measurement

3. The need to adapt the approach and be flexible …

• There is no one size fits all approach: depending on the specificity of each organization and their marketing maturity, the path to follow is not the same
• Be ambitious in the performance measurement project, while adopting an agile approach through an incremental and iterative process in the elaboration of the dashboard

4. … to develop continuous improvement and promote innovation

With the evolution of technology, abundance of data and high expectations of customers and management, it is no longer enough to measure performance in a "basic" way. It is necessary to be more precise, flexible and innovative to offer personalized and customer-centric campaigns.