Anna Hutton-North, Sabre Associates
The demarcation between finance and marketing is becoming increasingly blurred as data-driven organisations seek to increase market share
Within any business the finance and marketing functions usually have limited interaction. However, the consequences of covid19 and technological advances around business analytics may see a change in this relationship. As organisations increasingly utilise data to formulate decision-making, the gap between finance and marketing may well shrink.
Data-driven businesses believe they have a competitive advantage. After all, data-driven decisions are a fundamental element of business life: predictive analytics as part of R&D, artificial intelligence (AI) within IT support, and business intelligence to manage major portfolios. However, the adoption of data-driven marketing is more limited to advertising placements, customer profiling and personalised experiences.
Post-pandemic, businesses concerned with winning work need to review how marketing activities will support opportunity generation. Reduced budgets and smaller marketing teams (the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK reports that just under ten per cent of marketers have been made redundant during the pandemic) mean organisations need to adopt a smarter marketing approach to support winning work.
Establishing a data-driven marketing strategy for 2021 allows a business to have confidence that the marketing activities will be contributing to winning work and generating the required return on investment (ROI). When resources and budgets are limited, it is vital that the marketing activities can demonstrate they are contributing to bringing in business.
Who should lead?
While marketing remains the natural domain for the sales and marketing team, using the skills of a finance professional to lead and review the marketing strategy provides several benefits. The ability to analyse data on revenue, client lifetime value, levels of engagement and impact of spend means that decisions around the marketing strategy can be made using substantiated, robust data.
One example of where this has happened successfully is at Harwood Hutton, a firm of accountants and business specialists, where Adam Stronach, a corporate finance expert, heads up the marketing function. The executive team believed that changing their approach to marketing would contribute to both client retention and new work for 2021.
Stronach led the review programme to analyse the data and performance information on clients, channels, budget ROI and engagement levels. The data was held in different repositories, but by bringing it together through the review it allowed the marketing team to have transparency around those marketing activities that clearly contributed to winning work.
The firm used the five basic principles of creating a data-driven marketing strategy:
• defining the marketing objectives to be achieved
• gathering data
