Posted by Alden Cushman on Fri, Aug 27, 2010 @ 10:37 AM
We've all suffered through one of those conversations with an endless series of questions: “What are you doing? Why? What are you doing? Why?....” As many know, sometimes the only way to end the cycle is to answer with: “Why not?” Well, during the past year we've noticed a somewhat troubling trend in marketing data reporting questions that sounds a lot like “Why not?”
We start by identifying the drivers of this behavior. Four market forces are pushing most marketing organizations to improve and increase their reporting of marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs):
- Increasing focus on marketing ROI
- Improving marketing processes and skills
- Increasing implementation of marketing automation platforms, and related systems and tools
- Increasing number of marketing service agencies that report campaign and program ROI measures
One of the interesting, and some might say unfortunate, consequences of being able to track the results of marketing campaigns, programs and tactics is the desire to search for answers by analyzing and reporting as much data as possible as often as possible. Senior management demands better information and intelligence to make better business decisions and improve results. However, since many companies (especially public ones) run on a quarterly cycle of reporting financial results every three months, many marketing groups have adopted the same reporting mentality.
The biggest problem is that most of our B2B clients have marketing and selling cycles that last well beyond three months, so they are reporting on marketing lead generation and nurturing activities that do not fit neatly into a quarterly view. The result is usually a potpourri of misleading conversion ratios between program response rates, inquires, marketing qualified leads, marketing sourced pipeline, marketing influenced pipeline, and a handful of other measures. We don’t advise that marketing groups refuse requests for quarterly or even monthly data, but do yourself (and senior management) a favor and put it within the context of the company’s regular marketing and selling cycles.
Begin by uncovering the decisions senior management is wrestling with and use those to determine which marketing metrics and KPIs impact them the most. Don’t measure and report on everything you can. Generating pages and pages of marketing activities only confirms what many senior managers believe, that marketing has no idea how to prove its return on investment. Report on fewer items and make sure to compare last quarter’s marketing metrics and KPIs to the same quarter of the previous year; don’t compare them to year-end numbers. Prove to senior management you understand their underlying business issues, you are investing in campaigns and programs designed to address those issues, and you can report the right indicators in the right timeframe to show concrete positive results.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Wed, Aug 11, 2010 @ 10:42 AM
We've seen it happen in the realm of demand creation; marketers have realized that being more analytical about their activities has led to more measurable results. Understanding your marketing data leads to better targeting, segmenting and the more optimized pairing of tactics and offers to drive better results throughout the waterfall. More and more organizations are realizing the importance of the marketing operations role to make this a reality.
Now it's time to see a similar role (and more) that applies the same analytical discipline to the seeding of demand, typically the responsibility of the reputation function in driving engagement and awareness. When it comes to social media specifically, we continue to see a lack of insight and analytics both in the processes companies use to measure and in the capabilities of the technologies that are designed to assist in defining, collecting and analyzing metrics without employing expensive services. You may gain some depth of information regarding your share of voice, sentiment and engagement, but how wide does this knowledge go and what is it telling you about moving the needle for driving business?
Organizations need to take the solution into their own hands. Whether social operations becomes a specific role or a responsibility spread across a number of employees, the key is to take all the data and metrics you can collect to follow the social media breadcrumbs and connect the dots in ways that existing technologies and agencies can't provide beyond traditional brand measurement. Sure, it's useful to understand the demographics, habits and preferences of your networks and communities within Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but you need the insights that go across these multiple communities (and more) to not only better understand and serve your customers and prospects, but to be able to market to them more effectively as well.
So, who is responsible for social operations within your company and how do you see such a role evolving?
Posted by Megan Heuer on Fri, Jul 30, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
Are your marketing programs attracting the right kinds of prospects? Only your data can tell you. While it’s tempting to stop at reviewing email response rate, opt-out percentages or unique visitor growth on the website, understanding and optimizing B2B marketing tactic effectiveness requires a little more digging. You need to look into the details behind those numbers and how tactics impact the overall health of the contact database. Here are some guidelines for using the contact database to shed light on what works and what doesn’t.
Define Who You Need to Attract. It’s hard to know if a tactic is encouraging interactions with the right contacts if a clear goal has not been set as to who the desired audience is. Who exactly is your desired audience for the tactic and what goal are you supporting with them? One this is defined, if you are pursuing an outbound tactic, take a look in your database to see how many of these individuals you already know. If the universe in there is smaller than you know it to be, consider targeted contact acquisition. If the tactic is inbound (meaning not sent out to specific names but positioned where the right kinds of contacts go to encourage them to respond and identify themselves), then define the baseline of contacts that meet your criteria so you know when additions are made. The initial goal is to estimate a rough size for the segment you want to reach and what percentage of it you already know so it’s clear when gains or losses happen in the database.
Build a Segment Data Snapshot. For your target segments, track overall contact gains and losses monthly to see what the net impact of marketing programs is on building the contact database. As part of your normal database reporting, compare the number of names and the percent of total database added each month (de-duped from existing contacts) to the number of contacts lost or no longer usable. This not only shows whether the database is growing or shrinking, but at how rapid a pace movement is taking place. The calculation also can be used to determine incremental return on investment for specific addition efforts; for example, a demand creation program might contribute 100 leads, but if it also added 500 new names to the database and helped with the completion of 250 more records as well, there is incremental value that should be identified and reported.
Put together, these elements provide a warning system for changes that could hurt down the road. They’re also a way to identify highly successful approaches that should be shared and emulated to boost others’ contact acquisition results.