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The best way to ensure you get stellar results from your marketing is one that is overlooked surprisingly often: measure! When you first launch a marketing program, you may have to start by measuring activities, but eventually you'll be able to measure results. Most importantly – and this is where a lot of measurement efforts fail -- you can measure progress against your plan.
Here are a few guidelines to help you get started or to assess your current measuring system:
Keep it simple – collect only data you'll actually act on. With applications such as CRMs and web analytic programs, it's easy to measure more than you really need to know. Just ask yourself this question: “What will I do with this information?”
Make sure the data is collected in the same way all the time. If you're trying to spot a trend, consistency is often more important than accuracy.
Look at the findings regularly and share it with others. There's nothing like a little visibility to make sure things stay on track.
Integrate your marketing measurements with measurements for sales, customer service and any other client-facing groups. This will allow you to see how well the entire process is working.
What should you measure?
While marketing analytics can get very complex, especially for large, multi-national, multi-business firms, you can accomplish a lot by just tracking some combination of the following:
In-bound inquiries. How many new inquiries has marketing generated this month (or week) and over the last 12 months (or year-to-date).
Qualified Leads. How many of these inquiries are actually real prospects?
Sources of leads. How many leads have come from each of your major sources: teleprospecting, direct mail, email campaigns, networking, referrals, online or offline advertising, public relations, search engines, events. At what cost?
Qualified opportunities. How many real sales opportunities are currently in the pipeline. How many were generated by marketing? How does this compare to the number and value you expected to have?
Progress against your marketing implementation plan. Have you and your marketing people completed the activities you committed to complete?
General website traffic. What is the trend for the number of people visiting your site? Where are they coming from? What percentage sign up for your newsletter or to download information?
How often should you review your measurements?
For a high-level strategic view of marketing progress, a monthly review will give you a good picture. To actually manage a marketing effort on a tactical level, a weekly review of the data is better.
Charts and graphs are generally better than words and numbers simply because research shows that people absorb information from the former faster than from the latter.
Two secrets to making measurements work:
Secret #1: Continuously compare what's really happening to what your marketing plan says should be happening. For example, it's good to know that you've generated 150 qualified leads so far this year. It's far better to know that, according to your plan, you should have generated 200 leads by now.
Secret #2: When you review the reports – whether monthly or weekly – act on the information! Make decisions. Redeploy resources. Change your approach. Whatever it takes to get and stay on track.
In summary
Those of you who are already well into a good system of measuring and reporting on a complex marketing operation are likely to tell me I've oversimplified things here. And maybe you're right. There are loads of other important bits of information that are good to know and watch. The point I want to make is: you don't have to do it all in order to get a benefit. As Nike says, Just Do It!
© The Tatum Group 2007
The capability of determining how effective are the activities involved in marketing and to prove that value to the bottom line of the company is more important than ever before for professionals in the field of marketing. Marketing personnel must be able to place quantification markers on the effectiveness of existing programs and to trace and judge the return on the investment made in marketing over a period of time in order to be able to document that the budgets for the department or group are worthwhile.
In perhaps no other area of business activities, marketing personnel must have quantification so they will know whether the investment is providing expected and anticipated returns. Marketing definitely is a business activity that requires tracking in real time.
As with many of the performance metrics developed by a company, it's important that all levels of management be aware of the role of marketing in the business before attempting to set metrics which reflect how well the marketing group is meeting the satisfaction of the goals.
In order for the business marketing group to be successful, they must improve the return on investment and must be able to prove that their methods are working.
One of the measures of accomplishment of any campaign is the use of a survey. This can be tied effectively as one of the measurement devices for determining whether or not the customer has found and is using the marketing information which has been developed by the company.
Obviously marketing is related to the bottom line revenue figures but to wait until an entire campaign is finished before checking to see if it worked or not makes it difficult to respond early in the campaign to tweak something which is not working as well as it could be.
Instead of measuring the success of the marketing campaign by how many sales have been made, use metric on increasing the sales list through such methods as a direct marketing email list. If the marketing group is effectively reaching and developing leads then having people joining an email list of some sort would be an effective way of determining whether or not you are reaching for target audience.
You can determine the success rate of the marketing campaign by measuring the number of people who are responding to an email request for free information. As your marketing group learns more about the potential customer, the products which you offer are more tailored to the people who are most likely to respond to that particular offer.
The assumption is always that the more contacts a certain individual has with your organization, the more likely he is to purchase from you. So if you are measuring various factors and features which together make up an effective marketing plan, you can use metrics such as the growth of your email distribution list as one very effective metric. As your mailing list grows, it is almost inevitable that your customer list will grow as well.