Measuring ROI, tracking brand metrics and proving the effectiveness of marketing is growing increasingly important to businesses, but according to a report by the Fournaise Group, 76% of marketers are tracking effectiveness wrongly.
Most still use the wrong KPI's to try to prove the work of marketing efforts and campaigns, it claims.
In the first half of this year, its study into more than 500 campaigns revealed four findings it claims are “shocking”.
Fournaise measures the effectiveness of 2.5+ million marketing strategies, campaigns and ads across traditional, digital, direct and mobile in more than 20 countries each year. Fournaise is no stranger to contentious figures. It published a report in 2012 that stated 80% of CEOs didn't trust marketers.
More than three quarters of marketers still think of effectiveness in terms of awareness, using incremental awareness as proof of the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Fournaise believes this is misplaced.
Secondly, it found that 74% of marketers don't pay enough attention to customer value propositions and value form and style over content and message.
The report stated: “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. They focus too much on “how” the message is to be delivered and not enough on “what” message should be delivered.”
Thirdly, it identified that 71% of marketers are using engagement as a way to demonstrate effectiveness, which Fournaise again claims is misplaced because traffic, views, calls, clicks, open rates, likes or tweets don't equate to conversion.
It claims that 86% of marketers “mistake engagement for conversion – which is something Fournaise believes may be the most alarming fact of all.”
Jerome Fontaine, global CEO and marketing performance chief at Fournaise, said: “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? 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.”
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