Member Relations

Pipeline Marketing is one of the most commonly reported performance metrics for private golf and country clubs. Here are 3 Ways to Measure your ROI.

Resort and Club Member Relations and Marketing Directors point to their pipeline marketing metric with pride because it serves as a sign of accountability and proclaims, “We, as Membership professionals, take our role in our club's revenue creation process seriously!”

If marketing intends to demonstrate accountability, you’ll need to show performance against what marketing invests in. To get your arms around this, look at where marketing program dollars are being spent. If your club spends significantly on sales enablement, pipeline acceleration or renewal efforts, measuring your marketing sourced pipeline is a rough way to demonstrate achievement.

Instead, look at significant areas of investment and ask what they’re expected to achieve. Commonly, marketing is expected to help sales close their pipeline faster, succeed in more deal cycles, and drive client relationships and revenue. But sales has a role in this, too. And some marketing leaders – cautious about asserting too much credit for metrics they don’t own singularly – retreat into sourcing metrics. That’s a mistake – it leaves marketing investment uncovered by metrics that can show marketing impact.

The Right Way to Measure

Demonstrating the impact of marketing when performance is the result of cross-functional efforts requires three elements:

1. Show performance of shared impact metrics. Whether the goal is increased deal velocity, better renewal rates or improved customer loyalty, you need to demonstrate that the impact metrics marketing invests in are, in fact, improving.
2. Provide proof of marketing participation. You need to prove that when marketing tactics are accepted by target audiences, impact metrics improve. If marketing isn’t involved, it will be uncomfortably difficult to assert any marketing influence over that performance improvement.
3. Present evidence that performance metrics change as marketing participation changes. Evidence of marketing impact requires a comparison. Some deal cycles may have light levels of marketing interaction, some may have heavy levels, and some may have no marketing interaction at all. When you compare what improvements take place when marketing is present to what happens when marketing is not, you can develop reasonable proof that marketing is making a difference.

The latter type of metric is commonly referred to as measuring marketing influence. Clubs and resorts new to measuring marketing influence typically begin by measuring what portion of sales pipeline marketing has interacted with. The number of clubs doing this has been trending up in recent years, but only less than 50 percent of marketing organizations regularly measure marketing-influenced pipeline. The other 50 percent of organizations likely have a gap in their measurement approach and the way they prove marketing’s value. And when value isn’t proven, marketing resources understandably come under fire.

The good news is that even if your club isn’t incorporating influence into its measurement system, it’s not too late to start.