Justifying the Need For Marketing
Answer this question. In times of economic hardship, which department is one of the first to get budget cuts?
Marketing? Why? Because of all departments, quantifying the return on investment in marketing campaigns is very difficult. In any marketing campaign, how can you tangibly associate a new lead or prospect to a particular marketing exercise accurately?
Identifying where a lead comes from can be difficult especially with so many routes to market, but getting a sales enquiry from a website doesn’t mean that the television advertising wasn’t a prime factor in generating the interest, nor does getting a phone call mean that your web site wasn’t a factor in leading up to the phone call.
Because marketing is seen as a blanket tactic, spreading the nets of awareness to catch the attention of new leads, it is thought by others that the ends do not justify the means. In times of hardship, the first impulse is to cut back on what appears to be perceived unjustifiable expenditure.
Marketing is the lifeblood of a business and in times of economical hardship cutting the prime revenue driver in the business can be a disastrous action, why? Because, marketing is not only a revenue generating machine but also an intelligence gatherer. Without marketing, you can’t effectively gauge whether your product is being pitched to the right industry, whether it fits into the portfolio of your target prospects, how your product placement performs against those of competitors etc.
What needs to be recognised is the importance of recording information by all departments from the origin to the fulfilment of a sale which marketing is a crucial factor.
In developing SymVolli, an individual sale can be tracked through every stage of the sales process so that all departments can see where, when and how the sale has progressed. Even where leads cannot be originated, dates of origin can be associated so that quantitative analysis can be applied to specific marketing campaigns. This information collated together can give a clear account of the value of every department including marketing.