“Conviction is the luxury of those sitting on the sidelines.” This is what John Nash's (imaginary) boss says in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” For those of us who choose to play rather than watch, measurement is the compass that guides us through our mistakes.
What is your most important marketing tool?
Your spreadsheet application should be high at the top of the list. In this day and age, running your marketing department without constant attention to the numbers is simply irresponsible.
The starting point is clearly defining the goals. What is the market impact goal of the specific activity? Is it the total number of leads? Number of qualified leads? Closed deals? Maybe brand awareness?
All of these goals have to be expressed in quantified, measurable terms, or “measurable market impact.”
Ignoring the numbers is not just irresponsible, it is also inexcusable. The great thing about electronic marketing using e-mail and the web is that almost everything can be tracked. Making smart use of these vehicles means that you design your marketing campaign results to be measurable, using trackable links, source-specific landing pages, and tracking codes. These are relatively simple to implement, so we'll assume that you've got this part right.
Still, there are plenty of examples where marketing departments don't manage their activities by the numbers, for a variety of reasons. Let's examine some of these more common reasons, and see how you can work around them.
Example #1: “Our goal is to create brand awareness, but measuring it is too expensive.”
There is hard truth in this statement. Conducting market surveys to measure the impact of specific marketing activities on brand awareness can be cost-prohibitive for most small companies.
What you can do is estimate the number of people exposed to your marketing message by each marketing activity. It is not the best or most accurate measurement, but it's still better than not measuring at all.
Defining the results in such measurable terms allows you to compare different branding vehicles, such as print advertising and online newsletter sponsorship. Both can generate brand awareness. But which one is more effective?
Example #2: “We don't expect too many leads from this tradeshow, but we have to be there; otherwise, people will think we are in trouble.”
Maintaining your company's image is a legitimate and important market impact goal, yet there are many ways to achieve it.
This goal can and should be defined in measurable terms, such as the number of people exposed to your presence. In this case, the cost of the tradeshow should be allocated against two market impact goals--lead generation and company image.
Example #3: “We don't know how many people will respond to our e-mail campaign.”
