Evaluate Your Marketing

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Marketing Survival Newsletter - Evaluate Your Marketing

In my last newsletter I discussed the concept of Market Allocation. A concept that came from the investment world, where risk is diversified (so they say) by a proper allocation of investments. I can’t speak to the pros and cons of investment strategies, but I liked the concept relating to marketing. In that newsletter I talked about the principals of good marketing, including proper marketing allocation – multiple step activity, consistency, and multi-faceted marketing. I also talked about longevity of marketing campaigns. The objective was to communicate the concepts that go into building a successful marketing campaign for software applications, or any product or service.

In this newsletter I will address the next step to long-term success in marketing – measuring the results of your campaign. As a marketing manager, and now business development and marketing consultant, I know how difficult is it to measure the impact of a marketing campaign. My clients are mostly small businesses who are working to become middle size and big businesses. Their budgets are restricted, and their manpower is very limited. In most cases both budget and resources are stretched to the limit by just implementing a good marketing campaign. Measuring the results of each activity is out of the question. Even in bigger companies where resources are more readily available, measuring the result of a specific activity is almost impossible. Knowing this, I am still going to try to give you some tools to get a handle on the results of your marketing.

START WITH A CAMPAIGN THAT CAN BE SUCCESSFUL

I mentioned earlier some of the elements that go into successful marketing. Use them. Make sure you have several activities going at one time. Many people believe that if they have only one activity they can accurately measure the success of that activity. The problem is that almost any single activity is doomed to failure because it cannot achieve the two most important steps to successful marketing (creating awareness, and creating demand). Creating awareness and demand takes long-term repetitive contact with a potential customer. It is a very unusual single activity that can achieve this.

IMPLEMENT LONG TERM CAMPAIGNS AND BE SLOW TO CHANGE

By implementing long-term campaigns you give yourself the time to make small changes that improve your results. By long term I mean a minimum of 6 months, 12 months is even better. That doesn’t mean you can’t make adjustments to an on-going campaign, but by committing to a strategy for this amount of time you give yourself the opportunity to measure results, fine tune the campaign, and achieve maximum impact.

Another factor in successful marketing is your products sales cycles. If your applications have a sales cycle of 45 to 60 days, for example, and you run a campaign for 90 days, you are barely seeing the first sales results before the campaign ends. There is no opportunity to make adjustments that improve the campaign, to create momentum, or to build on your success.

LOOK AT YOUR TOTAL CAMPAIGN

Look at a total campaign, not one activity. If you have four activities (Ads, Email, Telemarketing, and Postcards for example), each of these activities will contribute to reaching your customers in a different way. By removing one activity you may undermine the success of the other activities. For example, let’s say each activity drives people to your web site, and assume that it takes on average 6 to 9 contacts with a person to get them to access your web site. Since each of your activities may count as one contact, it may be any of the activities that become the activity that drives them to your site. By removing one activity you reduce the number of contacts, and automatically reduce the opportunity for success.

Now that you know what not to do, I’ll give you some rules for developing and changing a campaign.

Establish a campaign on sound fundamental principals.
1. Diversified, long-term campaign
2. Well presented, to-the-point descriptions of real benefits, with a consistent message
3. Clear concise call to action
Code each activity so you can track inquiries from each activity.
1. This will not guarantee quantifiable results but will at least allow you to achieve some level of tracking.
2. If you cannot code each activity, build into your response mechanism a method for the respondent to indicate where they heard of you.
Measure your results on a monthly basis. In other words, look at the activity code each contact provided to determine which activities are drawing the most response. If you don’t have any form of tracking built in, then have your telesales people give you their feedback. The people taking the orders will have some sense of who is responding and why. You can then look at number of inquiries in a specific time frame, and compare them to the time frame in which each activity occurred. The relationship between marketing activities and lead counts should give you some idea as to the effectivness of your marketing activities. Keep in mind that marketing activities may take from 30 to 90 days to produce a result, depending on your products sales cycle.
After the first 90 days evaluate each activity in relationship to the whole. Use your common sense and intuition to decide what is really working and what is not.
For each activity, ask what is a reasonable expectation.
1. In other words, some activities are to create awareness only, others are designed to create awareness and a response. Don’t drop an ‘awareness only’ activity because it doesn’t create a traceable result. It very well may contribute to other activities results.
After evaluating each activity, and the whole campaign, decide what wording, presentation, and product positioning is drawing the best results, then adjust each activity to shift in that direction.
Make changes every three months and continue to track and adjust the campaign.
If you decide to drop a specific activity, drop only one at a time, so you can measure the impact that change has on the whole campaign.
1. Be sure to replace a discontinued activity with another activity to maintain a minimum of three activities at any one time.
Build a database of marketing result information that can help you over the long term to avoid the same mistakes, and lead to more successful campaigns.

It is important to know that it is almost impossible to know exactly what activity is producing what results. None-the-less, it is important to gain some idea of the relationship between activities and results. For small business, your goal should be to build a fundamentally sound campaign, track results in some way, and make small adjustments over a long period of time. Companies who change campaigns every 1-3 months are not only short circuiting their marketing results, but also are never allowing their message or their product image to be fully realized by their potential customer base.

You might wonder why I said to "Use your common sense and intuition to decide what is really working", instead of using more scientific methods to determine what works and what doesn’t. The reason is that there are no more scientific methods to determine what works and what doesn’t. Sure, you can spend millions of dollars to determine what works, but remember "New Coke"? Sometimes the more one spends, the more foolish one gets. That doesn’t mean that experience and objectivity don’t help in making good decisions. But, the best compass I’ve found for measuring what works, especially for small business, is your gut sense, along with all the other criteria I’ve outlined in this article.

In conclusion, even through it is almost impossible to know exactly what is working and what is not working in marketing, you can determine, in a general sense, what is producing results. Follow these simple rules: build your marketing campaigns on sound principals; measure the results on point-of-contact information; understand that you need an overall campaign to contribute to the results of any one activity; make changes slowly and for the long term; make decisions based on the data collected, and on your and other experienced professional’s common sense. By making these rules the foundation of your marketing activities you will have a very good opportunity to gain the best return from your marketing investment.

~Nick Vasilieff

This newsletter was written by Nickolai N. Vasilieff; freelance writer and marketing consultant specializing in high technology industries.

For more information see www.nvasilieff.com. To contact Nick with questions or feedback, call 503-267-6339 or email vasilieff@mac.com.

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