6metricsToday's business climate requires high accountability for anyone responsible for marketing and thus the discipline of measuring marketing will definitely continue to evolve in the future.

The marketing metrics continuum provides a framework for how to categorize metrics from the tactical to strategic. By navigating this metrics continuum, from activity-based to predictive, marketers can move towards more effective marketing measurement and align measurement and metrics with business outcomes.

It wasn't long ago that marketing metrics was all about measuring activities. This type of measurement, what can be called Activity-Based Metrics, essentially involves counting. As the creative side of marketing gives way to the analytical data-driven side, measuring takes center stage. The first step for many marketers toward metrics is basically to look for various things to count and numbers to report. Tracking website visits, demo downloads, event attendees, numbers of leads, number of web site hits or analyst report coverage are all examples of Activity-Based Metrics. While these are all good forward steps toward measuring, they do not link marketing to business outcomes. Activity-Based Metrics doesn't satisfy the C-Suite's need to understand marketing's contribution to the company, states Laura Patterson, President, VisionEdgeMarketing.

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The next logical step along the marketing metrics continuum, she says, is commonly referred to as Operations Performance Metrics. In this stage, the marketing function is being managed like a business. And since a marketing metrics framework has to demonstrate how marketing enables the organization to realize these outcomes there has to be made a transition to Outcome-Based Metrics or the discipline of marketing merely becomes a sales support, thereby losing its ability to influence organizational strategy.

Once an organization masters Outcome-Based Metrics, it is only a step away from Leading-Indicator Metrics that facilitate business decisions regarding strategic direction. And once there is enough historical information, it's possible to create statistical models that will actually enable Marketing to predict, with some degree of certainty, the impact of specific initiatives on business performance. These statistical models become the basis for Predictive Metrics. (Source: Wikipedia)

By MediaBUZZ