Who is Accountable for Your Marketing Campaign?
Accountability can mean different things to different people. Running errands, being punctual, paying your taxes – these are all ways you are accountable for various aspects of your daily life. When it comes to being accountable for a marketing campaign, it’s about measuring and monitoring the commitment a person, group, or organization will make to deliver a specific, defined result.
A successful nonprofit is accountable for the financial and strategic initiatives of the organization. To be accountable, the marketing development function examines a program’s ROI on the financial side of the equation.
When the marketing department’s commitment to increasing market share and donor value are measured, that’s a great example of making the department accountable for its strategic initiatives. It can be easy for a group member to point a finger at another department or person when the ROI is poor. But that’s counterproductive. To avoid this kind of behavior, align marketing objectives with business outcomes, and link the marketing results to a company’s financial performance.
So, who is accountable for your marketing campaign? We believe, everyone is in it together.
In a viral video by actor Will Smith, he stresses the need to be responsible for our actions, regardless of whose fault it may be. And, wisely, he says taking responsibility isn’t admitting fault; it means you’re fixing a problem. You’re being accountable.
Managing a marketing campaign is no different. You’re responsible for the results. Good or bad, it’s on you to be accountable for what’s working and what’s not. Being accountable for marketing results is imperative for every business. Here are ways everyone should be accountable. Remember: ROI is everyone’s responsibility, so everyone has ownership.
Understanding Your Budget
It’s easy to look at a budget and think it’s enough to spend to simply get the word out. While that is one tactic, it’s not the most effective. Every organization needs to be accountable for its money, which means knowing why you’re spending, where you’re spending, and what results you expect to achieve by doing so. Every marketing campaign is restricted to the available budget. It’s important to know how much you have to spend and make those dollars stretch.
The idea here is a well-spent, well-managed budget. A plan should have every single cent accounted for. The results should be noted numerically, with appropriate data. While no one can predict the future and what will actually happen, it’s important to make smart decisions that are informed and as close to the target as possible. Otherwise, you’re just throwing money out the window, and no one wants to do that!
Work That Really Works
Fully understanding your budget is great – but you still have to implement a plan. A well-honed, organized process makes the execution much more refined and easy to track. A logical, step-by-step progression allows you to see where those dollars are actually getting spent. It also focuses on the goal. And that’s critical.
Every plan needs a goal. What do you want to achieve with your campaign? The dollars help determine this, but you also need to see some conversions, too. With a thought-out strategy, you can see what’s working and what’s not, and strategize again – that’s you being accountable, by the way.
This kind of thinking allows you to get a little creative. Who else can you align with to create a fresh take for your organization? Cross-promotional campaigns do twice the work with half the effort. But you have to make sure that your campaign actually works. Choosing the right partnerships is key. Partners have to be accountable too, after all.
So choose partnerships wisely. Who has a good presence where you’d like to be? It’s important to know your channels. Who is on YouTube or Facebook? Who is reading your newsletters in your email campaign? Is it who you thought? Your whole team needs to know the answers to these questions. It’s the job of every one of them to deliver an effective strategy.
Learn, Learn Again
You may or may not get the results you planned for on your first or even second shot. But that does not mean your marketing efforts were a loss. Gaining insights and learning from history to get the desired results can be very fruitful. Maybe you thought women in their 20’s were the audience you were reaching most, but in fact, your biggest following ends up being women in their 40’s. Nothing wrong with that! It just means you need to create a different campaign with a new strategy keeping these very important findings in mind. You can still go after those younger women, but now you have a new audience – go after it!
The same can be said of the customer journey. For example, you may have a great social media campaign that’s converting your audience to your website, but they don’t stay on the site to complete the desired action. You know something’s wrong with your site. And that’s something you’re accountable for. Shrugging it off won’t cut it; you and your team have to address the problem. The next steps should be to evaluate what is working with your social media and bring that technique to the website. Accountability means constant retooling.
I’m sure it can go without saying, but in business, the evaluation process is constant. Successful organizations embrace that concept in their marketing efforts and know there is always room for improvement when continued growth is part of your mission.
Resources:
https://blog.thefabulous.co/will-smith-explains-fault-vs-responsibility
https://www.diffen.com/difference/Accountability_vs_Responsibility
