Marketing Business
Acceleration

A new operating model for a new era

So much has
changed in
marketing in the
last 10 years.

Marketing automation. Analytics. Deep personalization. Intent data. The meteoric rise of the martech stack has given marketers tools to execute incredibly sophisticated data-driven campaigns.

But despite this seismic shift, so much has also
stayed the same.

It’s clear that something’s been left out of all the progress marketing has made:
the digitization of the business of marketing itself.

And now, after that decade of obsessive investment in go-to-market automation, the number and type of data silos has exploded. That’s a problem.

The current marketing operating model needs an upgrade. Badly.

As it stands, marketers are stuck using an operating model that’s outmoded, disconnected, and opaque.

Data is locked up and disconnected in spreadsheets—so marketers can’t respond at speed to market disruption or sudden trend shifts. Visibility is severely hampered, so nobody in the department can really tell what impact they’re having, or what campaigns performed well (or why). Spend forecasting amounts to best guesswork.

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It all adds up to marketers finding themselves trapped in the Fog of Marketing, a fragmented state of operations where marketing is still:

Learn more about the Fog of Marketing

Tactical

Consumed with low-level configuration of martech tools, instead of giving the CMO visibility into how marketing goals and plans are being implemented by dispersed teams.

Limited

Marketing data is based on snapshots disconnected from critical dependencies, serving as a retrospective system of record instead of a forward-looking strategic resource. 

Fragmented

Episodic, one-off planning processes, or worse, “shadow planning” diverges from marketing strategy, preventing collaboration and inhibiting creativity.

Blinded by this fog, marketers are stuck operating in efficiency mode (essentially keeping the lights on) when they need to accelerate, innovate, and transform.

But now, there’s finally a better way.
It’s called marketing business acceleration.

What is marketing business acceleration?

Marketing business acceleration is a new operating model for enterprise marketers that optimizes planning, performance, and productivity. It provides a comprehensive planning and spending framework, common taxonomies and KPIs, and real-time data transparency.

A new operating model built for today’s fast-moving markets

Learn how marketing business acceleration can help CMOs cut through the chaos of managing plans, budgets, project workload, and performance data to get the visibility, velocity, and agility they need to run marketing like a business.

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It’s based on an operating model with three principles:

Connected

Closing the gaps between planning, spending, and execution to give a clear picture of marketing ROI.

Comprehensive

Giving real-time insights based on trusted data captured at the operational edge of marketing, not in isolated spreadsheets.

Continuous

Enabling continuous planning, forecasting, and spend management to react to changes in buyer expectations and market conditions—achieving true marketing agility.

Marketing business acceleration brings operational clarity

Marketing business acceleration creates a state of real-time visibility across marketing operations to provide:

Planning clarity: Connect goals to budgets and execution
Spend clarity: Reconcile planned, committed, and actual spend across the business
Decision clarity: Connect every data point and make it available to empower teams
Return clarity: Understand what delivers the highest performance
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What does all of this actually mean for marketers?

It means their jobs just got much more exciting.

Now, marketers can unlock the full potential of their martech stack—and drive unprecedented performance and ROI. They can benefit from:

 

Data that marketing (and everyone else in the business) can trust

For a long time, whatever data the CFO had on marketing spend was considered the “true” measure of marketing ROI.

With the Marketing Business Acceleration operating model, CMOs can run their operations with the same level of accuracy and discipline as finance. That means there’s finally a single source of truth between finance and marketing systems.

Marketing leaders can now make decisions based on connected, accurate data, and converse with other parts of the business in a whole new way. Not only is marketing’s contribution to business success now accurately measured, it’s accelerated through cross-departmental cooperation.

And it’s great news for creatives, too. Not only can they base their creative decisions on what prior performance data tells them, but they can also see the tangible impact of those decisions.

Marketing that’s as fast as the market itself

The removal of silos and manual processes takes the brakes off marketing operations and enables marketing leaders to finally take advantage of the biggest missed opportunity in marketing: true agility.

When you can see and manage your spend within a few clicks, it unlocks a wealth of opportunities. You’re able to respond to any disruption in the market at the speed of the internet—shrinking and growing budgets between locations and verticals as the market climate dictates.

Marketing leaders and teams always have an accurate pulse on exactly the status of their budget, the performance of their programs, and how their execution ladders up to corporate strategy. With this hyper-agility, they can make decisions as market trends develop.

Financial planning that’s more than just best-guesswork

Being able to easily and unequivocally connect marketing spend to outcomes unlocks an entirely new level of visibility, judgment, and forecasting.

Financial analytics for marketing is no longer relegated to pure look-back scenarios. CMOs can finally wield predictive power that isn’t impeded by inherent blurriness.

Plus, the finance department no longer sees marketing as a place where spend tends to get a little fuzzy. They can tie marketing’s new and improved forecasts and budgets into the rest of the business, and let everyone see that marketing earns its budget as a value driver.

Ultimately, marketing business acceleration leads to the marketing department ditching the cost center reputation and becoming a provable engine for business growth.