ROI

Damon Ragusa, ThinkVine Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, presented at the iStrategy Digital Marketing Conference in Chicago this month on elevating the digital converstaion in the boardroom. In his presentation he discusses the steps marketers should take to link their digital marketing to financial performance and forecast future results.

Planning is all about reducing risks. Traditionally, marketers plan annually, aligned with the cycle of TV and print media buying. The planning timeframe would typically address only the following year. The key stakeholders form an executive committee where the marketer makes recommendations based on insights and analytics of historical spend data and aggregations of consumer data, which becomes foundational to the plan. 

The explosion in digital and emerging media channels has brought a huge volume of rich, but complex data sources. With big data comes the promise of better decision-making information and measurement of marketing ROI. A recent study found that 91% of senior corporate marketers believe that successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions. (2012 BRITE-NYAMA Marketing in Transition Study)

With the proliferation of consumer devices and emerging media channels, marketers must harness these changes and the associated data to drive ROI in the digital age. The opportunity for interactive marketing goes beyond individual social applications to enhancing a variety of marketing channels throughout the customer experience – playing a key role in the customer’s journey to making a purchase.

I recently saw an interesting article about how more marketing decisions are being made by computers.  The idea is that the decisions will be based on hard facts instead of hunches and emotional biases.  While I applaud the increase in rational thinking, and the use of hard facts instead of hunches, I dispute the assertion that human factors should be removed entirely.