I implore you, from my heart, I implore marketers to understand how most of us are functioning in a negative way and to get to a point where we are moving forward.

There are two important ways that marketers are not performing.

  1. Marketers are not aligned with business goals.
  2. Marketers are lazy about measuring their efforts.

In 2016 and into ‘17, ‘18, in-house marketers and digital agencies need to align to business goals, they need to measure their efforts in terms of revenue, and they need to ditch the old fashioned advertising values. Values that use soft metrics to measure success.

I see over and over again marketers who fail to understand, fail to measure and fail to learn how their efforts influence the bottom line. Sales is held accountable every single day. Marketers need to follow suit.

Those organizations who can pull this off, hold marketing efforts accountable to revenue, will flourish in the next 5, 10, 15 years.

It’s hard. I know this. To understand how effective your efforts are is tough. To put yourself on the line for how they perform. To connect with sales and connect to revenue.

But where we are at now it’s extra important.

I believe in reverse engineering marketing campaigns backwards.

  1. How do we want to report?
  2. How do we build to provide that reporting?

To summarize I think the marketer of the future will be heavily aligned to business goals. The marketer of the future will be capable of adapting best practices with alignment to what businesses with unique needs require. And they will hold themselves accountable to measurable results.