Let the marketers market!

It's important to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, programs, etc. But when the measurements themselves and the process of acquiring the measurements start to supercede the programs, a problem is born. Especially if your marketing people are also your analysis people.

Successful marketers in a nutshell are able to take information from various sources, boil it down, discover a way to do something, approach a customer, and generate sales/leads/positive outcomes, look at the data and do it again. It's sort of a rinse, lather, repeat approach. Unsuccessful marketers never get to do this. Often this unsuccessfulness is born out of the marketer also being the one to collect, manipulate, sort and present the data. This is what I call the "Proof I'm Doing My Job Approach".

Rather than actually marketing, developing programs, and driving the business forward, marketers get caught up in a whirlwind of demands to know what is being done, how it is being done and when it is being done. Instead of talking about the upcoming program, the marketer talks about the past program to the minute deal. Words like "I'm going to" or "Next month we will" are replaced with "I'd like to" and "I would" and "I wish".

Let the results speak for themselves. Let the marketers develop programs and leverage analysts to pull together the results to share with management and marketing for evaluation to move forward. Don't dwell on the losses and failures, they are inevitable. Focus on the next steps, and how to improve. But above all, you hired marketing people to be marketing people. Let them do their job. If more than 25% of my time is dedicated to proving that I'm working, I'm probably not going to be doing as good a job as I'd like. And if you are pulling your marketing people out of their job more than 25% of the time for this, consider highering an analyst.