Aligning marketing goals with broader business objectives involves clearly articulating the strategy and forecasting the impact of your plan and associated tactics.
Consider a scenario where your marketing team invests millions of dollars sponsoring the U.S. Open. You launched several impressive tactics, including a new video series and a digital ad campaign. They look great, but was that money well spent? Can you measure it? Did it have any impact? These are tough questions that CEOs will ask, regardless of your campaign's awards, anecdotal success, or vanity metrics.
Different industries measure different aspects of their marketing efforts. For example, a tech company may focus on metrics like user acquisition and engagement, while a CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) enterprise might prioritize brand awareness and sales lift.
Even within the same organization, different seniority levels focus on different metrics. Executives care about high-level strategic objectives, while managers seek more granular, tactical measurements. Therefore, your campaign needs to demonstrate all these metrics and, most importantly, show the business impact.
Effective communication is a key part of how success (or failure) is perceived. Stakeholder engagement, understanding, and support require marketers to adopt the lexicon and metrics relevant to their industry. Presenting metrics in a way that resonates with each stakeholder ensures that the value of marketing efforts is understood and appreciated.
Here are two examples of how that hierarchy is created at a tech company and a CPG organization:
Tactical goals are important to marketing, but overall business impact is what matters most. Tailor your metrics to different stakeholders within your organization and ensure alignment with both industry standards and overarching business goals.
Responsible for ensuring that strategic goals are effectively measured, the role of strategic operations and planning (StratOps) is becoming increasingly prominent on marketing teams.
In fact, every organization needs a dedicated StratOps person (or team); the duties shouldn't be managed as side-tasks because the success of a marketing team ultimately relies on their ability to measure and manage the impact of their campaigns. In enterprise organizations, someone on the marketing team must focus on the operational architecture.
While the responsibilities fall to different teams depending on your organization and industry, having a dedicated planning team (or person) ensures that these goals are achieved efficiently. In B2B organizations, this is typically filled by marketing operations or a marketing chief of staff. In B2C organizations, marketing operations may not be as common, and someone from IT or data analysts takes responsibility for strategic operations.
Although who is responsible may vary, how strategic operations and planning should operate remains essentially the same. While marketing operations typically provides tactical metrics that serve the needs of marketing managers and specialists, StratOps is an elevated role. They are perfectly positioned to measure the intent and impact of campaigns. Your StratOps team should be empowered to address the broader, more critical concerns and shift towards strategic measurements and insights.
Every marketing department needs a dedicated StratOps team (or person) to turn marketing goals into measurable success and report overall impact against business goals.
Why does taxonomy matter?
Imagine you’re the CMO of a global tech company, preparing for a board meeting. Your CEO wants an update on pipeline and opportunities created by a $25 million global campaign. But when you talk to StratOps it’s a rat’s nest of attribution, spreadsheets, and conflicting reports. There’s one hour before your meeting with the CEO, and there’s no clear way to communicate the ROI of this campaign.
This is where taxonomy comes in. By having a common naming convention (taxonomy) and relationship between campaign elements (hierarchy) across your global marketing organization, it enables you to report apples to apples reliably. That consistency encourages marketers to make comparisons, consolidate results, and consistently report on any campaign they are running, in any region.
Before diving into campaign plans and budgets, this foundational step ensures that the impact of marketing campaigns is clearly understood and measurable; providing a solid basis for more strategic decision-making. With that framework, marketers are equipped to assess both the intent and impact of campaigns.
The naming convention you use to identify the elements of a marketing campaign. Example: Campaign, program, and tactic.
The ordered relationship between objects in the taxonomy. Example: Campaign > Program > Tactic
A long-term thematic set of programs based on specific buyer’s needs for a targeted audience. The programs are further organized into families that have quantifiable outcomes. Example: Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign.
A collection of related tactics focused on the same objective and targeted to a specific point in the buyer’s journey. Example: User generated content, email newsletters, and paid ads that all promote the new iPhone.
A specific activity that supports your marketing campaign and goals. Example: A referral program.
Here’s an example of a taxonomy hierarchy where the tactics are nested under programs and campaigns that align to a marketing objective. In B2B organizations, the best practice for hierarchies is Campaign > Program > Tactic. However, in B2C organizations, the best practice is Program > Campaign > Tactic.
To establish your taxonomy, there are three key steps:
Establishing your taxonomy is one part of campaign architecture. The other crucial part is defining the data associated with your campaigns. Do you want to view campaigns, programs, and tactics by audience? By geography? The CEO and finance will ask about how investments are performing across product lines, regions, or business units. StratOps must account for all the attributes that marketing or finance will want to use for different views of plans and budgets. This preparation ensures that all the necessary data is captured at the point of execution for comprehensive analysis and reporting.
Consistency is key. Your taxonomy and hierarchy are the campaign architecture that enables global teams to talk about their programs in a clear and consistent way with stakeholders across the business.