The role of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is constantly in flux— from leading the charge on growth strategy to evolving your brand and messaging to quantifying ROI on your marketing spend.

Through this constant change and evolution, one challenge remains consistent:

clearly explaining the value of marketing.

Marketing encompasses so many key elements and putting them into practice takes thought and skill. Even those with little to no knowledge about marketing can understand the variety of activities that contribute to a successful marketing campaign. But defining the strategic impact of marketing— proving that it actually works— is a whole other story.

CMOs are increasingly responsible for explaining marketing investments and impact to a variety of stakeholders, including company leaders, finance departments, board members and investors. But they struggle to do so in a way that is balanced and easily understood while being able to focus on and define the actual value created.

That is precisely why I created the ART of Marketing (Awareness, Recognition and Traction), a new and simple approach to explaining, measuring, and benchmarking the strategic impact of marketing.

The ART framework provides a common language to have a constructive conversation about the long-cycle and short-cycle aspects of effective marketing by focusing on leading and lagging indicators of marketing’s impact. Grounded in data and trended over time with benchmarks aligned to the company’s strategic goals, the ART framework gives CMOs a consistent framework and methodology to convey the value of marketing to a broader audience.

This is especially relevant in light of the many challenges CMOs face when explaining value. For example, according to The CMO Council- KPMG Research, only 18% of marketing leaders strongly believe both finance and marketing have the same timely access to integrated customer data, transactional information, and market intelligence to inform better marketing investments. Additional obstacles include CMOs being underrepresented on public boards, expanding business priorities and limited data insights.

Think of it this way; marketing creates ART that creates growth.

And being able to explain the value of marketing in this way gives internal and external stakeholders the evidence needed to continue supporting this growth.

Let’s break it down further.

Awareness

An increased focus on awareness often starts with these questions of whether your company or brand is recognizable, known, and findable. Increased awareness can result from a number of different business activities and outcomes ranging from M&A activity to organic market expansion to rebranding to loss of market share. To help articulate growth in awareness, CMOs can address things like media impressions, organic web traffic, social media following, SEO ranking improvement, blog post views and email open rates.

Recognition

When it comes to recognition, CMOs must think about whether they’re getting traction from their awareness efforts. Are brand messages and differentiation being echoed back to your brand? Are you seeing more quality inbound activity? Awards, thought leadership and employee or advocacy programs are all great examples of activities that build brand recognition over time. Proving increased recognition can be done by measuring things like inbound media requests, analyst mentions, customer reviews, awards won and tagged social posts.

Traction

Finally, traction encompasses whether your recognition is increasing your brand’s qualified leads. Is the quality of your leads improving? Are your marketing efforts improving the velocity of your overall sales process? Are your clients entrusting you with more work? An increased focus on traction often results from factors like top-of-funnel sluggishness to the pressure to do more with less budget to low conversion of marketing-sourced leads. Some examples of demonstrating traction include pinpointing qualified leads created per campaign dollar spent, CAC, online product sales and increased customer spend.

The ART framework takes the mystery out of marketing’s impact, helping CMOs make a stronger case for why continued investment in marketing is warranted. The best part is that it can be customized to the unique needs of each individual company.

You can learn more about our proprietary ART framework and schedule an intro call to get started.

— Katrina Klier