Hack Your Marketing Meetings With Five Metrics that Actually Matter

Don’t ever let a meeting get derailed by a PowerPoint gone wrong again

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Let’s imagine you’re giving a big marketing presentation.

You start off strong, talking about strategy, cost savings, sales, and brand love, but then the meeting veers off course. Suddenly, you’re deep in the weeds explaining an irrelevant data point that’s captured your boss’s attention and shifted the mood in the room. What started as a conversation about the larger strategic vision for your brand morphs into “Why does X brand have more Instagram fans than we do?”

Before you seek permanent refuge in a cold, dark room, know that this scenario could have been avoided had you considered tailoring your meeting-killing PowerPoint to an executive audience. In a joint study conducted of marketing leaderships’ priorities, challenges, and success factors by Salesforce and LinkedIn, executives relied on three metrics to determine the success of their marketing strategy: revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and ROI.

The tension between marketers and executive leadership is real

Yet, in a Fournaise Group study, 63% of marketers “don’t include any financial outcome when reporting on and presenting marketing results to their CEOs and top management.” As a result, 70% of CEOs don’t trust their marketing team to grow their business.

However, misalignment often presents trust-building opportunities. Marketers have tremendous access to real-time data and powerful revenue and cost efficiency insights that can be gleaned as a result. Now, you have the ability to show how your work generates top-line revenue growth and/or cost savings. In today’s economy, not only do marketers have to understand and predict the needs and wants of their customers, but they also have to translate their customer’s voice to business use cases, projected revenue, and justifiable expenditures.

In a 2012 Fournaise Group report, 69% of CEOs claimed that marketers reside deep within their social and creative bubbles, focusing “too much on parameters such as ‘likes,’ ‘tweets,’ ‘feeds,’ or ‘followers’ — the very parameters they can’t really prove…