Plannuh Inc., makers of the world’s leading AI-Driven marketing leadership platform, announced the first wave of results from the Operational Marketing Index (OMI), a survey used to measure the operational capabilities of a company’s marketing planning and budgeting processes. The Operational Marketing Index also produces a set of tailored recommendations to help marketers improve their operational efficiency.

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Today, marketers have a variety of tools to measure their tactics but nothing to measure the effectiveness of their operational marketing. The purpose of the Operational Marketing Index is to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of a team’s processes for executing marketing plans and optimizing budgets. This has never been attempted before, and as a result, it has generated a unique data set that marketers can leverage to improve their strategic marketing.

The Operational Marketing Index survey is comprised of:

• Sixteen multiple-choice questions
  • Eight questions on marketing plan management – maximum score of 50
  • Eight questions on marketing budget management – maximum score of 50
  • Total OMI is a score out of 100: plan score plus budget score
• Questions are weighted based on their relative importance
• Results are benchmarked against all other respondents

Aggregated results from initial rounds of surveys completed:

• The sample size is 217
• The mean overall score is 45, and the median overall score is 44
• 14% of respondents scored above 70

The first chart shows the distribution of the overall scores.

The second and third charts show the answers to the 16 questions in the survey (8 marketing plan questions and 8 marketing budget questions). The pink represents positive responses from the top 2 boxes (excel and good), and the blue represents negative responses from the bottom two boxes (some and none).

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One of the most alarming takeaways from the survey is that a minority of marketers (39%) are setting their marketing goals to achieve company objectives. If marketing goals are not aligned with company goals, they are unlikely to be considered valuable. Other interesting findings from the Operational Marketing Index:

• There is significant room for improvement in overall marketing planning and budgeting where the average score was below 56% for positive performance on all 16 questions
• 54% of respondents say team visibility of their marketing plan is inadequate or non-existent, and 65% say the same of their campaigns
• Operational marketing initiatives where marketers self-reported excelling:
  • 28% of marketers excelled at knowing what budget was spent and what is available
  • 26% of marketers allocate 60% or more of their budget to campaigns that support their goals
  • 25% of marketers accurately reconcile expenses with finance regularly
• Operational marketing initiatives where marketers self-reported the greatest need for improvement:
  • 38% of marketers do not identify and reallocate unused budget throughout the year
  • 53% of marketers do not build best/worst case scenario-plans
  • 31% of marketers do not accurately track expenses by marketing campaign and finance/GL code
• While top-performing companies performed well across the board in both planning and budget management metrics, they excelled in budget management. They also excelled in topics related to budget and plan execution. Conversely, the lowest-performing companies scored disproportionately poorly in budget management and plan execution.

“There are many scoring systems out there for tactical marketing activities, but there has been nothing available for marketers to measure the operational effectiveness of their marketing plans and budgets,” said Peter Mahoney, founder and chief executive officer of Plannuh. “The Operational Marketing Index provides marketers with a measuring stick for their marketing plan and budget, while highlighting areas of improvement.”