CIM Research

The Chartered Institute of Marketing, (CIM) recently published a study titled: “Improving Marketing Effectiveness”. The reported mainly concluded that almost half of the companies they interviewed are still not using customer or marketing metrics to help inform board-level decision making. (For those that don’t know, CIM offers popular professional marketing courses and training, and is the largest (and oldest) marketing organisation in the UK). Their most popular course is the CIM Professional Diploma in Marketing which is aimed at middle management.

This is clearly a surprising discovery – you would think that customer research would be the priority, after all – shouldn’t businesses fuel demand (or discover and respond to the the demand)?

This CIM study of 200 senior marketers and board level executives was an investigation into how companies measure marketing performance. The report concludes by saying that most marketers in the United Kingdom, notably London and Manchester, are making progress when it comes to basic marketing metrics, such as customer satisfaction, acquisition and retention but not much in the way of measuring performance management.

What can marketing do to change this? The recommendations are that UK marketers need to move from managing metrics to managing performance – placing emphasis on actual performance. The report, published by the marketing powerhouse, suggest that when marketing achieves this level of competency, it will be able to leverage metrics to support the decision making process, investments, and drive change. Courses offered by the Chartered Institute of Marketing teach these values: especially the value from the investments in marketing tools, processes, systems and skills for measuring marketing effectiveness will be lost if we do use the insights from metrics to help guide the organisation.

If you are interested in the above, and keen to assert yourself in your workplace, then a CIM qualification would be ideal for you. Take a look also a good look at CAM courses. CAM stands for Communications, Advertising and Marketing is is the “communications wing” of CIM. The recently launched their CAM Diploma in Digital Metrics and Analytics. This course has three modules:

• Marketing and Consumer Behaviour
• Digital Marketing Essentials
• Web Analytics and Social Media Monitoring

This marketing diploma course is a qualification aimed at those who already have some online marketing knowledge and are seeking ways to improve their digital marketing knowledge with a specialism in web analytics and social media monitoring.

Interesting to also note that each of these modules is an award in its’ own right: i.e. a good way to get a really good marketing qualification under your belt for a very reasonable fee.