Ask an Expert: Balancing Marketing Cost Efficiency with Effectiveness

This month on Ask an Expert, Jackson Pollard, Vice President, Asia at McCorkell Group, answers your questions Balancing Marketing Cost Efficiency with Effectiveness.

Q: Many businesses struggle to demonstrate marketing ROI. What metrics should marketing leaders focus on to prove the true impact of their investments?

A: The majority of our clients are B2B companies, and when speaking with them about a new initiative, I always start with the fundamental question: what are you trying to achieve? The organisation-wide answer is usually some version of “we need to sell more”, although ours tend to come dressed as something supporting that: drive revenue, generate pipeline, more leads, better leads, build awareness. Each of these comes with its own metrics and measurements, which can take time to fully understand.

To broadly answer this question in a B2B context, I’d take it back up to the wider objective by getting closer to the sales function; aligning with what they need is so often spoken about, yet rarely done well. You’d be surprised at the number of marketing teams who aren’t aware of the typical deal size or sales cycle of their products or solutions. And to the inverse, I’ve met many sales managers who don’t know what a marketing lead is defined as in their company. Have some planning conversations, and ensure you have mutual understanding of what you’re trying to get out of each other’s efforts, how you will measure it, and how you will keep each other accountable.

This is important, as let’s face it, even the most established enterprises in the world don’t have a completely accurate picture of marketing attribution, despite the amazing tech out there. This marketing-to-sales alignment will go a way in offsetting that, and is the reason we still talk about ‘account-based marketing’ today, despite the concept rising to prominence back in the 2010s.

Also, getting closer to sales provides a commonly untapped avenue for understanding what’s working: customer and prospect feedback. Performance data shows what happened, but qualitative feedback helps explain why. To ensure this isn’t lost in their heads or on their desktops, I’d recommend establishing a feedback loop with sales & BDR teams once a fortnight, and consider tools that add this layer of intelligence to your CRM, such as Gong.

Q: How can marketing leaders determine which activities are essential to continue investing in and which should be deprioritised?

A: It’s a real challenge sometimes; we can be easily seduced by shiny new objects (now more than ever with the advent of AI wrappers). If you’ve ever seen Scott Brinker’s yearly landscape report, we are now sitting well over 15,000 marketing tools available! That’s a full-time job in itself: identifying, evaluating & implementing what is right for your business.

Firstly, I need to caveat that the world, and especially our industry, is changing so rapidly. Nothing that is new will yet have a ‘best practice’, nor if it did can you be ‘innovative’ at the same time. This is a juxtaposition that so often needs to be balanced correctly (but I want the best of both worlds!)

Before investing in a new activity, I always counsel our clients to be clear on the ‘source of truth’ behind the decision. Is it based on customer feedback, prospect behaviour, sales input, market data, previous campaign performance or at least a reasonable forecast?

Once that is in place, teams can test with discipline: agree the success measures, set review points and be prepared to have an honest conversation based on the evidence collected. That allows for iterative success versus simply chasing the next shiny thing.

Then, often you’ll find that the tried-and-tested means are the most successful for you, as long as they are done well. Some of our best campaigns have come from simply ensuring we have a strong, single-minded proposition, and that it is amplified appropriately across a select few channels. Consider speaking to a Content Strategist if you don’t know your proposition, and check with an experienced media planner if you’re unsure what those channels may be for you.

Finally, if you’re having trouble reflecting across multiple initiatives, programs or channels, it might be worth looking up the ‘start, stop, continue’ framework to try as a thought exercise.
 

Q: How do you evaluate the success of brand-building activities that may not deliver immediate returns?

A: It's a tale as old as time: the investment in brand hasn’t come through yet, and your vanity metrics are only saying so much. My best answer is to ensure you have set your brand-building activities up correctly and trust in the compound effect: that unseen progress builds beneath the surface before your results suddenly catch up with your efforts.

For those without the luxury of time, it’s imperative to secure senior stakeholder trust & buy-in to your efforts (and how long they might take); otherwise, you may find your runway is much shorter than anticipated.

Again, establishing a feedback loop with your Sales and Business Development teams would help here by adding a bit more intel. As your brand grows, you can consider tools like Meltwater or Brandwatch to give you a bit more ammunition to fight the boardroom, such as brand sentiment and competitive share of voice.
 

Q: Where do you see AI creating the biggest opportunities for marketing teams today?

A: There are a number in play.

Speed-to-market is an obvious one; when talking about creative production specifically, generative AI is really great at offer-led ads and other short-form content. What used to take us weeks now takes days, and our client reviews are often longer than the actual time for production! Some great tools your designers may have are natively integrated, such as in Photoshop or Illustrator. For image generation, Midjourney still seems to be the gold standard, of which you can then spin into video with Runway. For the less-technical or the SME’s of the world, I’m liking the tools within Canva.

In the mid-to-long term, I believe there is a different opportunity, and not only because generative AI is commoditising low-end routine work.

LLMs are fundamentally trained on statistical similarities, and the more that goes out, the more will eventually go back into the model. Over time, this echo chamber means everything will start to sound more the same, a byproduct of which we are already seeing with our discontent for ‘AI slop’. Therefore, at the point where marketers are faced with a big brand or product moment, it will pay to invest in the high-level strategic thinking that delivers something authentic, what people will notice & trust. I’m a big fan of using humour in this way.

Separate from the creative discipline, something I am loving is AI’s ability to help formulate your go-to-market strategy. With the right series of prompts, Claude can now help to elicit your ideal customer profile, explore competitive gaps and assist with market research. Then, you can turn all of that into your positioning, messaging pillars, content strategy and more! This can be at the brand, product, or even campaign level. Again, this kind of stuff used to take weeks or months.
 

Q: If you were advising a CEO or CMO reviewing their marketing budget today, what are three things you would ask them to consider?

A: Several years ago, when teaching people how to tidy up their home, the famous Japanese declutterer Marie Kondo asked, “Does this spark joy?” - I believe we can apply that here.

I’m kidding, but it makes sense to have an approach centred around keeping items that serve a clear, practical purpose and actively assist in moving your life forward. Some dimensions that I would consider in your top-line planning are:

• Does it ‘move the needle?’ - If you can’t articulate how an item supports one of your key goals, then it may not be such a priority.
• Is our tech stack set up appropriately, or do we need another tool? - Often overlooked at planning stages, and then, come execution time, we spend more time & effort on workarounds.
• Do we have the capability to pull this off? - Marketing teams are leaner than ever before. It’s worth considering how everything can get done without further investment creeping in; can we fit it all in? Can my internal team handle this, or do we need external support?

Ask an Expert is a monthly series in which we call on subject experts within the AustCham Singapore community to answer questions that we may have on a specific topic. The strength of our community is in the diverse expertise within our membership, and we want to use this initiative to tap on the knowledge of our members to enrich the community as a whole.

Our expert for this month is Jackson Pollard, Vice President, Asia at McCorkell Group Pte Ltd, an integrated B2B marketing agency and AustCham Singapore member.

McCorkell works across Asia-Pacific, where Jackson has spent the past decade advising marketing and sales leaders on marketing strategy, demand generation, account-based marketing, campaign planning and sales enablement.

Connect with Jackson on LinkedIn.