A bank's V.P. of Marketing once confided in me that she was more than a bit vexed about her organization’s internal reputation. "My team and I are all about our customers," she told me. "We’re all measured on uplift, retention and satisfaction. We are so metric-focused my head spins sometimes."

Indeed, she and her team had delivered the goods, using detailed data to enrich micro-segmentation, behavior predictions, target marketing, customer value scores, and customer feedback processes. The problem according to the V.P. was that Marketing was "still seen as the make it pretty" department.

Happily, Marketing’s rap as nothing more than corporate PR or, worse, graphic design, is eroding as revenues are mapped directly to successful campaigns and sales uplift. For marketing departments to maintain this edge, they’re going to have to retrench in 2009. Here are four top-of-mind "to do" items that every marketer should consider for the coming year:

1. Get serious about online communities. Where other than the Internet can a company convince its customers and prospects to interact and share information with the company—and with each other? Companies from Proctor and Gamble to Best Buy to Zappos.com are encouraging no-holds-barred on-line dialog with key corporate leaders. "I’m in the process of humanizing the Ford brand," claimed Scott Monty, the automotive company's head of social media. In so doing, these executives not only promote their brands. They vet new products ideas, encourage feedback, and coach their customers on doing business with them. It's honest, it's cheap, and it's a way to get real with consumers.
2. Figure out your ROMI. Despite the hype, few companies calculate, never mind use, return on marketing investment (ROMI) as a success measure. Most product or segment managers will admit that their estimates for campaign success rates rely more on gut-feel than hard analysis. This is usually due to the fact that marketing organizations don't retain historical information about promotion success rates, buyer profiles, or purchase details in a sustained and structured way. Without ROMI it’s tough to prove the incremental value of marketing campaigns. Until we figure out ROMI, these campaigns continue to be measured by wet fingers lifted high in the air.
3. Redefine—and re-launch—CRM. A few years ago I wrote a book on Customer Relationship Management. Since then I’ve had several casual conversations with my publisher about releasing a second edition and my retort was always, “But nothing’s really changed!” Well, that’s changing. With social media driving a new level of transparency, companies are reconsidering what it means to be a “good customer,” and re-evaluating their outreach strategies. Organizations that heretofore considered CRM synonymous with on-line call center applications or campaign management should reconsider its very definition, and even create from-scratch CRM strategies to reflect the new reality.
4. Manage your data. With all the hype over data governance this past year (I know, I’m one of the hypers), companies blur the line between data governance and data management at their peril. Governance—the business oversight of enterprise data—is all well and good, and bringing managers to the table to form information policy is an awesome accomplishment. But at the end of the day we need to find, define, correct, synchronize, apply rules to, and deploy that data. That’s data management. The extent to which marketing organizations collaborate with IT to formalize data management is the extent to which they’ll see sales uplift—and all the other benefits resulting from information analysis—in 2009, and beyond.

The most effective marketing organizations are those that never rest on their laurels. They’re always evolving, considering new ways to reach out to customers and have more relevant conversations to not only capture their share-of-wallet, but entrench their loyalty. It’s time to evolve. Customers and prospects hang in the balance.