Second Annual IPA Effectiveness Roadmap Report

At Go Ignite, we are super proud of the work that we do with the IPA to help brands and agencies better understand how they can improve the value they can create from marketing effectiveness.

Creating this report for the IPA is a key focus of our year, and brilliant to see that having a dedicated approach to effectiveness pays off.

The challenge, as ever, is not just in defining what effectiveness means, but building the program to deliver the right effectiveness programs, and embedding new ways of working into everyday processes.

So, what does the report show us?

The IPA believes that having a dedicated approach to marketing effectiveness in the form of a roadmap will improve effectiveness culture and that, in turn, means marketing effectiveness is a key driver of cohesive business culture and growth.

Those of you who have completed the Roadmap survey, or read the 2021 report, will not be strangers to our definition of marketing effectiveness and the framework we use to act as a catalyst for positive change.

“Marketing Effectiveness is the process of improving business performance from marketing activities, made easier and more impactful by people; data, tools & measurement; and a strong & clear focus.”

EffWorks Road Map (2022)

The framework is composed of four marketing effectiveness quadrants:

1. Marketing effectiveness focus: a clear vision of the role of marketing effectiveness strategy complete with a roadmap that explains how each step will create sustained business value.

2. People (buy-in and empowerment): the benefit of buy-in at top and senior levels, with defined roles and responsibilities, training on effectiveness capabilities in order to limit resistance to change, and a commitment to continuous learning and improvement.

3. The marketing effectiveness process: the cycle of applying increased marketing intelligence to decision-making, activation of marketing activities, measurement, and improved business results.

4. Data, tools & measurement: an effectiveness capabilities ecosystem creating increasingly relevant and impactful marketing intelligence, being fed by quality, accurate and timely data.

The measures of how well organisations perform against different elements, or quadrants, provides a benchmark tracker of effectiveness culture. For the 2022 IPA Marketing Effectiveness Culture report (supported by ISBA and Marketing Week), an online survey was shared with brands and agencies between the 27th April 2021 and 10th July 2022 from which there were 181 responses (compared to 179 in 2021).

“Both brands and agencies are better at learning from successes than they are from failures. However, agencies are better at learning from both than brands”.

EffWorks Road Map (2022)

Recommendations to improve process performance:

1. There is room for even more brands and agencies to have a clearly articulated planning process.
2. Most importantly, agencies need to be more aware of how and where their work feeds into the client’s planning process. This does not happen often enough. Responsibility sits with both brands and agencies to make this happen.

Marketing effectiveness does mean something different to every brand and every organisation, which is why brands and agencies should:

1. Work out what marketing effectiveness means to them
2. Define what success from a market effectiveness approach is: success in the next 12 months; in the next 24 months; in the next 36 months
3. Understand the challenges and pain points that need to be overcome to make your marketing effectiveness programme a success
4. Create and maintain awareness and buy-in to what you are doing and why
5. Shout about the results of what you are delivering, the difference it is making, and where you could make the programme even more successful by learning from what didn’t work so well
   

The findings and recommendations in this 2022 IPA Effectiveness Culture Roadmap present a great starting point or place from which to evaluate how your journey is progressing, or change course if needed. But each journey is individual, which is why we always recommend starting with a roadmap to create alignment, ownership and a defined step-by-step marketing effectiveness programme. The next step then is about creating trusted effectiveness partnerships between brands and agencies so that there can be better integrated ways of working to deliver against the same goals and objectives.