Marketing measurement is often regarded as a bit of a dark art. So either it is ignored as the domain of sages or obsessed over. Marketing has to be measured otherwise your campaigns are just guesses and your marketing plans are just hypothesis. Eventually you need to prove what you are doing works.
The secret is to find a balance.
The trick to finding a balance is set an objective for each marketing activitity and to see if it meets it. Your objectives need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time Bound) but they can be simple. Take for instance adding an ebook download to your website. As much you might like to develop a perfect metric for precisely quantifying return on investment, it isn't likely to happen. Instead focus on how many leads it generates (in this case assume a lead as everyone who provides an email address) or how many existing leads it drives back to your website.
Remember the cost of measuring something should never outweigh the value of doing so.
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself when planning your marketing measurement:
- Does what we attempting to meaure and the way we are doing it feel practical?
- Are we learning things that will allow us to make better marketing decisions?
- Is our measurement process simple and consistent?
Trends in numbers are often as important as the numbers themselves so use trends to learn from your efforts to constantly improve your effectiveness. Soon you will be regarded as one of the sages of marketing measurement’s dark art.
This article is an excerpt from the eBook, The Seven Deadly Sins of B2B Marketing - One Red Bird's Guide to Identifying the Mistakes that are Costing You Money. Download the entire eBook.
