A Fresh New Look at the Scope and Dimension of Marketing Productivity

The general perception about productivity is doing more of the same functions in your work process and logging more completed tasks. This is no longer enough to define productivity because it means a lot more now, especially how it can help an organization achieve its objectives and goals.

According to Eliyahu Goldratt, author of ‘The Goal’, doing more of the same functions in a process just makes you busier. There has to be a method and purpose for doing more and you ought to ask yourself – ‘Why should I do more of the same functions of this process?’ Or, ‘What will I achieve by doing more of the same functions of this process?’

There is also the issue of time and any additional input in any form, must bring out a corresponding output.

Set benchmarks and thereafter, set your goals

If you want to increase marketing productivity, you cannot just rely on doing more of what you have already been doing. That has a threshold and you must know it well to compete meaningfully. In marketing you need to move with specific goals that can change with time, usually after you have achieved one goal.

There is no scope of stretching a goal that has already been achieved. You can only set a new goal with a higher benchmark that promises to take your product offering to a higher level in terms of quality and consumer satisfaction. Even if there is no competition in your product segment, you need to find newer areas of excellence to set a benchmark and thereby, new goals.

Your marketing journey – from input to output

It is true that your marketing inputs or efforts will bring you proportionate output or results. However, a lot depends on your specific business model, industry, competition and for how long you have been in this business.

Marketing inputs mainly relate to your market outreach efforts and involve communication and interaction with your audience. Looking at a purely digital marketing effort, you will need content in the form of blogs, articles, emailers, videos and advertisements.

The outcome of your marketing efforts will be reflected in search engine results page (SERP) rankings, wherein your webpages should figure in the first SERP. For emailers, you need to have a target for engagement and traffic. If you have an app for download, the number of downloads will be an important indicator of how effective your marketing effort has been.

Finally, it all boils down to the number of visitors coming to your website as a result of your marketing efforts. It doesn’t end there because the most important objective of the entire exercise, which is to gain more customers and sales, should not just meet your expectations but must exceed it.

There is a substantial cost for this marketing input or effort that you made and it should give you a good return on investment (ROI). You must therefore calculate the cost against the revenues you manage to earn through visitor conversions and sales output.

Redefine marketing goals

It is common knowledge that marketing sets up the pitch for sales to grab an opportunity by the horns, so to say, and make the sale. That surely sounds exciting but as already explained, it takes time, effort and money to do all that. However, it does not always move in the simple way we visualize it.

Hence your marketing inputs may change depending on different situations like cutthroat competition, demand stagnation, or change in customer preferences to name a few. To overcome these challenges, you will need to change your strategy and/or the benchmarks you had set earlier.

When you do that, you invariably have to make changes to your goals. However, it is not necessary that the cost of your marketing inputs will rise when you get down to implement the new strategy. It might even require you to scale down your inputs although such situations are much less than those when you have to scale up the inputs.

Invest in marketing automation tools

These days, marketing objectives are achieved at the kind of speed and scale that was never heard before. If you just take the case of simple email communication, there is so much work to do in a non-automated work environment that you could end up using far more personnel than you would with good automation software in place.

Starting all the way from a welcome email, to reminder emails, you may send emails on a customer’s birthday or anniversary, and from re-engagement to survey and feedback as well as review and testimonial emails. You would also send emailers on product updates and launches.

Marketing automation tools help to level the field for you if you happen to be running a startup where the sole objective is to attain scale in customer engagement and conversions before anything else. Once you deploy the tool, you can easily assign other more productive tasks to your resources rather than have them spend time in sending emails that are pattern-oriented tasks which technology can do more easily and effectively.

With the priorities of your marketing strategy and goals set, for the time being, you can focus on standardizing your process workflows. Do it not just for the current processes but also for the future when you could face changes in your situation or in your market.

At the end of the day, the goal of all your marketing inputs is to obtain the level of output that is proportionate to your investment. In other words, you should get the ROI you expected with the kind of investment you made. Of course there would be variations in the ROI during the different times of the financial year but at the end of the year, your revenue should be where you wanted it to be. It is not just your return on ad spend (ROAS) but should also include returns on the cost of generating traffic into your website and then converting them. Only then will you be able to say that the goal of your marketing strategy has been achieved.