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Welcome to the The Marketing Source e-newsletter! Our goal is to provide
you with real-world marketing tips that you can put right to work in
your organization or business. If you have any ideas for articles, please
send them along.
The Magic of Marketing Measurement
Benchmarks. ROI. Metrics. NPV. Marketing Measurement is all the buzz.
Despite the trend, it can be overwhelming for Communications Directors
to figure out how to quickly (as in before the Board of Directors or
CEO asks) and effectively measure marketing activities. Help has arrived.
Read on for an overview of marketing measurement, complete with tips
to get you started or enhance your current process. And coming soon to
our website , a free ROI calculator.
Measurement 1, 2, 3
Step One: Get Going!
The number one reason organizations don't implement measurement systems
is that evaluating marketing seems too big and too complicated. We'll
admit that it's not simple. But unless you measure, you have no idea
of how effective or ineffective your marketing and communications truly
are.
Kick start your process by meeting with your CFO, sales team or other
staff members who can help you collect the data you need. For instance,
if you are going to measure incremental sales, make sure your CFO or
accounting department is aware of what numbers you will need and when
you will be asking for them.
By meeting with your data collectors up front and discussing your expectations,
you will not have to scramble to find data after the fact.
Step Two: Choose What You Will Measure
Pick a few key indicators, linked closely with your strategic communications
goals.We prefer eight to twelve indicators because any fewer and you
don't get a good overall picture of your results. Any more can become
too difficult to maintain. And don't lose sight of the overall goal.
It's not to collect piles of data; it's to get usable information that
makes your marketing strategies better. We could write an entire book
on measurement techniques, but here are a few simple ideas to help you
better measure your advertising, public relations, website and direct
mail.
Advertising
How you measure your advertising depends on your goals. If your advertising
is designed to generate a response - to get a sale, get a phone call,
get a client -measure that. Here are some suggestions:
- Efficiency of the media campaign - How many impressions did your
media buy deliver to your target market? What was the cost per point
of your advertising media buy? Are those figures up or down from the
previous month/quarter/year?
- Number of calls or sales - Does your call volume vary from month
to month? Is the number of sales or products sold up or down?
- Cost of advertising per unit of sales - Divide your total advertising
budget by the sales (or referrals or calls) you generated. If you spent
$10,000 on advertising to generate 1,000 inquiry calls, that's $10
per call. Is that good? Is that up or down from your last campaign?
- Awareness - more of a challenge to measure, but your best bet is
market research. Start with a baseline research study, then update
it every eighteen months to two years to measure changes in perceptions,
attitudes and awareness.
Public Relations
Measuring column inches (the number of inches your story takes up on
a page) is the tried-and-true approach for most people. But there is
much more to it than that. Let's face it; a story in the Main Street
Weekly isn't equivalent to a piece in The Wall Street Journal. Here are
some more meaningful indicators:
- Total number of publications that run stories about your organization
- Number of times published stories includes your key messages
- Number of times your organization is covered versus your competitors
- Tone of coverage - is it positive, negative, neutral?
- Number of quotes by people in your organization included in stories
- Shifts in attitudes or perceptions shown in ongoing market research
studies
Web
Most organizations can easily count the number of visitors to its website,
but that's only the beginning. Ask your hosting company to provide you
with additional reports. Here are some examples:
- How do visitors find your website, what key words are they typing
into their favorite search engine to find you?
- Are there patterns to the number of hits on your your site - what
happens during/after advertising flights?
- How long do visitors spend on your site?
- What pages on your site are trafficked the most?
- If you have an e-newsletter or downloadable materials on your site,
how many people are accessing those materials?
Direct Mail
Every direct mail or email campaign should have a call to action so
you can easily analyze your results. Here are some ideas about how to
track the response you get from various mailings.
- Include a dedicated phone number (one that isn't used for other calls)
and count the calls that come to that number.
- Include a website address (it could be your existing address or
one that you set up to capture response from a particular campaign)
and count the hits to that website address.
- If you asked people to respond for more information, how many inquiries
turned into sales?
Step Three: Put it All Together
Mounds of data and batches of numbers aren't helpful. Put together a
one or two page summary sheet. A simple spreadsheet that lists your key
indicators and your month-by-month results for each indicator will do
nicely. It allows you to identify trends, gives you an at-a-glance review
of your results for the year and shows how well your strategies are working
together.
The Last Word
When it comes to measurement, jump in and do something. Get started
and refine your measurement system as you go. If you wait until you have
all the right data and enough time to organize it, it may never happen.
If you still have questions, contact
us. We'll be happy to talk
with you and give you some additional resources on measurement and making
it work.
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