Being a commercial marketer means more than just presenting marketing’s impact to the board. It means building relationships with all functions of the business, looking outside of marketing, and taking a strategic view of everything you do. Rather than being focused on purely ‘marketing’ metrics, commercial marketers are focused on driving the growth of the business first and foremost.
Of course, which data you present to the board is likely going to depend on your business model and maturity. In a sense, then, there is no one answer, and whatever you present to the senior leadership should be considered and relevant to your business.
However, what we can do is look at what other B2B marketing leaders have done to present the impact of marketing. With that in mind, in a recent conversation with Annabel Venner, we spoke through how she personally acted as a commercial marketer in her 10+ year role as Global Brand Director and Partner at Hiscox.
This post will share Annabel’s approach to presenting marketing’s impact to the board in that time.
Context: What was Hiscox trying to achieve?
During Annabel’s time at Hiscox, the business was fast-growing and had expanded its direct (B2B and B2C) businesses beyond just the UK, and into Europe, the US, and Asia.
With that in mind, there was significant investment in marketing – both in terms of people and budget – to drive profitable growth. Therefore, there was a need to engage the executive committee and limited board, in order to demonstrate the impact that this spending was having.
So, how was marketing’s impact presented to the board?
Well, in order to routinely present the impact marketing was having in a clear, focused, and succinct way, Annabel created an easy-to-understand marketing dashboard. Although you may wish to put together a slightly different dashboard for your own business, Annabel’s provides an example of what worked at an industry giant.
In Annabel’s words: “The dashboard took many months to develop, and the objective was to develop a range of metrics that were understood, important, and linked to impact, commercials, and our customers. It also needed to work across all of our direct businesses in multiple markets.
There was a multitude of data that our businesses collected, looked at, and acted on. However, the key here was to think about what the members of the board needed to see to understand the role and impact of marketing. In other words, I had to consider what would be meaningful to them. I wanted them to engage with the dashboard, challenge the information and ask questions.”
With that in mind, Annabel settled on the following five areas for the dashboard:
- Top line commercials: Quarterly impact, new business premium versus marketing spend.
- Acquisition: High-level SEO and PPC performance, as well as key customer journey metrics.
- Customer value: NPS and CSAT scores.
- Retention: Lifetime value, not just one-off acquisition.
- Brand: “ABCD metrics”, measuring: awareness; brand affinity; consideration; and the decision to purchase. In order to collect this information, specialist research agencies were used, conducting interviews with people in their target market (i.e. “Here’s 10 insurance firms. Which of the following have you heard of?” etc).
These ABCD brand metrics had been used by the business for many years before the dashboard was developed, so fortunately the board did not need to be educated on their importance. There was also a strong pre-existing understanding of the importance of building a strong brand, and the impact that had on marketing effectiveness and retention.
In terms of actually presenting this information, Annabel says: “The dashboard was shared quarterly, in line with the limited board meetings, and was discussed in more detail when I had a slot to present to them. In my view, it drove better awareness with regards to how we tracked marketing impact/effectiveness, marketing was seen as more of an investment (rather than a cost), there was less challenge and more discussions about opportunities.”
