Quantifying the impact of marketing within a siloed organisation

This article is a follow up to our previous feature outlining the benefit of using person-centric methodologies for the purpose of sales forecasting. We recommend reading that article prior to continuing with this follow-up.

The majority of organisations collate a number of strategies and follow certain tactics to achieve their yearly forecasts which then form quarterly, monthly and weekly forecasts.

A key investment for any business falls within their marketing however quantifying just how much marketing contributes to the overall business outcome is an ongoing challenge. Many organisations further struggle with being able to identify the impact from both brand and performance marketing, across a combination of traditional and digital marketing efforts.

Generally siloed teams within the marketing function of an organisation will then disagree on applying a unified measurement approach. Instead, individual teams tend to focus on their own measurement methodologies which don’t align with the overall business outcome, therefore, creating distrust within the organisation.

We’ve created the following example to demonstrate the issues caused by this. Let’s assume marketing contributes 35% of the total sales for a particular business and the marketing department operates across two different teams. One team is digital marketing and the second is the traditional media team. Both of these:

1. Analyse marketing investment using siloed, retrospective data
2. Create inconsistent models and a lack of reliability or trustworthiness

As a result (illustrated in the picture below) – the digital marketing team claims 70% of all sales for the business are generated by marketing, as does the traditional media team. Consequently, the marketing arm of the business is claiming significantly more sales than their total contribution which fails to impress the c-suite.

Our suggested approach to combat this would be to build a holistic marketing measurement and attribution system that would combine the online and offline environments. This would provide full transparency of data inputs, modelling methodologies and data relationships to drive confidence across the business in the outputs and recommendations delivered.

This is achievable from the data readily available in the organisation along with the media data from the media buying agencies.

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