Profit divided by spend. A formula so essential to marketers, it's become almost a rite of passage among professionals, and absolutely critical to evaluating performance. But in reality, calculating and optimizing ROI can be much more complicated than you may think. Unlike other business functions, marketing departments can have an especially intricate supply chain. Whether it's managing numerous vendors and partners, or multiple internal teams working with several agencies on hundreds of campaigns, there's a whole lot to keep track of at any given moment. Here, we dive into an example of what a marketing supply chain looks like, and the biggest challenges it brings.
Seeing is Believing
Now you may be asking yourself - what in the world is a marketing supply chain and what does it have to do with my business? Well, you needn't look further than your own day to day. What systems and tools do you use? What teams do you work with? Who did you hire to deploy organic and paid content? The answers to these questions are the beginnings of your very own supply chain. Not only can this go from zero to extremely complex in no time at all when you add in multiple sub-brands, but each component has it's own focus, costs and data to keep track of as well. It certainly gives you some more perspective on just how big BIG DATA can get. In an effort to make this a little more concrete, we've mapped out an example of a common marketing supply chain:
The Problems (And Opportunity) You Didn't Know You Had
As you develop and understand your own marketing supply chain, there are key challenges that start to become apparent. Going back to our original concept of ROI, one can begin to see how it is so often calculated in fragmented silos, which can camouflage waste, inefficiencies and insights. In fact, not solving for poor or bad data has cost companies as much as $600B annually. The bottom line is, if you're not looking at everything from a 30,000 foot level, your ROI is incomplete and potentially misleading.
But we tend to be glass half full kind of people here at Unified, so while this can be substantial oversight for many marketers, if conquered, it can also propel brands to new performance heights.
Four Steps To Solving For Supply Chain Challenges
1 | MAKE YOUR MAP
Taking it one brand at a time, build out your own map of processes, teams and initiatives.
2 | BUILD CONNECTIVITY
Connecting the dots isn't just for kindergarten. Savvy marketers will rework processes and procedures to increase communication and standardize KPIs across all data, tools and teams.
3 | IDENTIFY WASTE & IMPORTANT LEARNINGS
Once you're able to see the big picture, next comes optimization. Are your agencies the right fit? What can be learned from organic initiatives that can be applied to paid and vice versa? How did the best performing teams optimize costs? These are the questions you'll be able to begin to answer.
4 | DON'T EVER STOP
This is not a one time process. As a living breathing organization, your strategies, processes and opportunities change over time. Consider updating your map on a quarterly, if not more frequent basis to maintain top performance.
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