Marketing is expected to drive measurable outcomes. Your team should try to keep the amount of time spent on administrative work to a minimum, so they can focus on driving marketing impact.
I often get questions from my team about the time that we spend on updating dashboards, reporting on metrics or thinking about new experiments and improvements.
Here are some typical questions: Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just focus on doing our jobs? We want to write great content, not spend time debating the measuring of its impact. We want to work on conversion optimization, not on optimizing the last decimal point of the micro-KPIs to measure every detail.
I believe a Marketing team that has found its Rhythm should not spend more than 10% of its time on measuring, learning, optimizing and planning. Once systems and reporting are in place and accurate, this should be doable.
The hard reality is that to get to a place where the dashboard is reliable, and the data is actually helping the team learn and improve, it can take time. Many teams struggle to get started, especially when the data is hard to get, and they are learning to do something with the insights. It’s critical to push through this first phase. If you get the basics in place, it will make a life for the marketing team much easier. Reporting and being held accountable will become a breeze, and more importantly, the great work the team does will become easy to recognize and reward.
The most important reason for a Marketing team member to get this done is that it will ultimately empower them to do their best work. If you can point at the impact your work has on the business, it becomes much easier to say “I got this, let me do my thing”, vs. a world where data is unreliable or misunderstood.
This quote from Abraham Lincoln says it all.
