There has been a lot of much needed discussion around social media ROI but I think this is just a small topic in the overall world of marketing accountability. Here are a few things for you to consider…

• A study by the CMO council found that LESS than 20% of top technology marketers surveyed had developed “meaningful, comprehensive measures and metrics for their marketing organizations.”
• 68% of marketers were unable to determine the ROI of their initiatives (according to the last major survey).

According to the Prophet Annual State of Marketing Study in 2007 which surveyed companies with revenues between 1-10 billion:

• 60% don’t have the right approaches or analytic tools to measure marketing accountability and ROI
• 45% don’t have the right data or market research
• 45% employ too many programs or make frequent changes

Measuring any type of ROI for any type of marketing effort starts with building a foundation and an infrastructure that allows you to begin looking at marketing accountability to begin with. For example, if you want to track social media ROI and the company doesn’t have customer information or analytics/metrics then guess what, you’re going to be tracking and measuring a whole lot of nothing.
Here’s another interesting thought:
How come some organizations have marketing directors, senior marketing directors, executive marketing directors, senior executive marketing directors, VPs of marketing, senior VPs of marketing, etc. Is it me or does it feel like everyone at every company is some sort of VP or director. Who on earth is accountable for all of the marketing efforts? This isn’t creating a hierarchy it’s creating a totem pole.
It’s great that we are talking about social media ROI but to be honest most companies in the world are having enough trouble justifying ANY type of marketing spend, let alone justifying something that most social media “consultants” say can’t be justified with a dollar amount.

• What about the ROI from that giant bill board?
• What about the ROI from SEO efforts?
• What about the ROI from the party the company hosted?
• What about the ROI from that giant full page spread the company purchased?
• What about the ROI from that television or radio commercial?

If I sound a bit uneasy about all of this it’s just because I’m passionate about ushering in and encouraging individuals and companies to really focus on measuring MARKETING accountability and ROI across the board. Going forward it’s not going to be good enough to tell executive teams that marketing is an “art” or that the “ROI can’t be measured” or that something is “impossible to track.”
This post isn’t necessarily designed to criticize and critique marketers, instead it’s a challenge and an offer for marketers to work with each other and with their organizations to help tie marketing spend to results. I certainly don’t have all the answers and I don’t think any one person does, but if marketers want to make their jobs easier then one thing is clear, we need to remove the “black box” around marketing and we need to start focusing on marketing accountability.
There are a lot of things that organizations can do to improve marketing accountability, I’ll give three:

• Understand your customers, deploy analytics/surveys/etc to find out what your customers want, who they are, and where they exist.
• Make sure your marketing and finance departments are closely working together and aligned (actually you should really make sure that all of your departments are aligned)
• Understand the RIGHT metrics that you should be measuring and tracking

I encourage everyone to watch these series of videos on marketing accountability and ROI
What are your thoughts on this? What do you perceive to be some of the greatest obstacles for marketing accountability and how can we get over them?
Want to continue the discussion? Send me a message on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. ANA Accountability Study: Marketing, Finance Not on Same Metrics Page
2. ANA: Progress in Marketing Measurement, Problems with Organizational Obstacles
3. Why Social Media Fails in Today’s Marketing Environment
4. Starch to Bring Online’s Accountability to Print Ads
5. Introducing ‘The State Of Social Media Marketing’ Report