The Fournaise Marketing Group – The Marketing Performance Booster®
LONDON, 21 September 2015 – In today’s age of business performance 76% of Marketers still use the wrong Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track and prove the effectiveness and ROI of their Marketing strategies and campaigns (and therefore prove their worth).
That’s one of the findings identified by The Fournaise Marketing Group, one of the world’s leading Marketing Performance Measurement & Management (MPM) companies. Fournaise measures the actual effectiveness of 2.5+ million B2C/B2B Marketing Strategies, Campaigns and Ads across all media channels (traditional, digital, direct, mobile) across 20+ countries worldwide each year – to identify what works, what does not, where, when and why, and advise Marketers on what corrective actions they should take to push their strategies, campaigns and ads to deliver better results, performance and ROI.
During the first six months of 2015 Fournaise analysed more than 500 Marketing strategy documents, campaign briefs and effectiveness reports created and/or provided by/to Marketers, and identified four shocking facts:
1) For 77% of Marketers, Effectiveness is still mainly about Awareness
77% of Marketers consider generating (incremental) Awareness a critical way to prove the effectiveness of their Marketing. Positioning Awareness as one of their top KPIs on their Marketing Performance Dashboard, these Marketers assume that if their target audience sees their campaigns/ads, the audience will automatically engage with them. In the world of Marketing Effectiveness using Awareness as a top Effectiveness KPI is wrong, as Awareness in itself is nothing if not specifically built to generate (measurable) Interest, Desire and ultimately Action (AIDA) that have a direct positive impact on the company’s top line (Revenue, Gross Profit) and/or bottom line (EBIT, EBITDA, Net Profit).
2) 74% of Marketers don’t pay enough attention to their CVPs
With Awareness as one of their top KPIs, 74% of Marketers believe it is all about standing out through creativity, media placement and anything digital, and that is reflected in the briefs they provide to their agencies. For these Marketers, form and style are more important than the content/message – they focus too much on “how” the message is to be delivered and not enough on “what” message should be delivered. This often makes them neglect or wrongly prioritise their brand Customer Value Propositions (CVPs) and product CVPs – the consequences: the CVPs they deploy are often weak, unattractive and/or don’t do justice to the very products they are supposed to generate customer demand for. In the world of Marketing Effectiveness this is wrong, as Interest, Desire and Action can only be achieved by deploying (A) solid, audience-attractive and audience-relevant CVPs and (B) optimised CVP Architectures.
3) For 71% of Marketers, Effectiveness is just about Engagement
After Awareness, 71% of Marketers believe that the next best way to prove effectiveness is to demonstrate their strategies, campaigns and ads engaged their target audience. Their Marketing Performance Dashboards are therefore full of Engagement KPIs including website traffic, views, calls, clicks, open rates, likes or tweets. Again, in the world of Marketing Effectiveness, Effectiveness can’t just be about Engagement as Engagement is nothing without Conversion – and by Conversion, Fournaise means more sales, more orders, more market share or more qualified prospects for example.
4) Marketers mistake Engagement for Conversion
Interestingly, 86% of these “Engagement” Marketers (voluntarily, genuinely or conveniently) mistake Engagement for Conversion – which is something Fournaise believes may be the most alarming fact of all. Indeed these Marketers believe that their Engagement KPIs actually prove they generated more business for their organisation, even though they can’t really (and unequivocally) link these Engagement KPIs to actual business and P&L-related results, and Marketing ROI (based on the real and precise finance-driven definition of Marketing ROI, not the fluffy ones they often come up with).
“The question is simple: when are Marketers going to finally realise that their job is to generate incremental (measurable and P&L-quantifiable) customer demand for their organisation’s products and services, and when are they going to start tracking their Marketing Effectiveness accordingly?” said Jerome Fontaine, Global CEO & Marketing Performance Chief of Fournaise. “If Marketers want to be taken seriously and have a bigger, stronger presence in the Boardroom, they need to stop living in their la-la land and start behaving like real business people” he added.