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As marketing teams gird up next quarter to create budgets for the next financial year, in what is undoubtedly a challenging market, its more important than ever to step back and measure the effectiveness of the current year's marketing programmes. These measurements must be quantitative so that a real RoI can be determined for the year's marketing spend.
In this article we will explore how to evaluate and measure the effectiveness of three widely-used marketing tools, namely, Events, Websites and Newsletters.
Events
Key Measure # 1: Quality, not Quantity
The number of events participated in is not a relevant measure, but the quality of the ones attended is. It is arguably a better strategy to spend a large portion of your marketing budget in one major event, rather then spread it equally across several.
How is this evaluated: Some important questions to be answered:
- Did your company participate in the most important event in your business category?
- Did Event participants include direct representatives of key stakeholders: Buyers/Investors (if you are looking for capital)/Partners (Potential/Current)
- Did you find the sessions thought provoking – did you go back with at least one key insight that could be applied to your business?
- Did it give you sufficient platforms to network with peers, prospects, suppliers, customers and partners?
- If you exhibited, did you build up a decent size suspect list, even if most are long term prospects?
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If you answered "Yes" to at least 3 out of 5 queries, then the event spend satisfies basic "hygiene" factors.
In addition, the following factors ups the score, hence RoI
- You leveraged the event for media coverage
- Your company had a speaking opportunity
- You generated some business leads
Scoring against the evaluation parameters above can be synthesized into 3 large take-aways as depicted in Figure 1.
Fig 1:
Graphic Title: Event Score Card
| Strike 1: Suspects Sales Funnel, Networking |
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Building Sales Pipeline |
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| Strike 2: Networking, Media leverage, Speaking Opportunity |
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Branding |
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| Strike 3: Business Insights |
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Evolved Growth Strategy |
Websites
Key Measure # 2: It's not about having a website, but how you use it that counts
About seven to eight years ago, most companies were scrambling to build websites – the issues were then mostly about laying claim to real estate and fighting off cyber squatters. Today, while companies typically have websites, few can lay claim to optimizing their full potential. At their least optimal, websites are on-line versions of print collateral. Slightly higher up the ladder are sites that incorporate a measure of interoperability and depth (through on-demand downloads). Optimised sites are those which are actively used by companies to capture leads, build thought leadership and enhance branding.
How does your website stack up?
Here are sample metrics for websites operating at three levels:
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Newsletters
Key Measure # 3: Use Mass media metrics to measure your narrowband messaging
- For a busy executive, mass media reads may be restricted to the headlines, stock market coverage and 1-2 sections
- Not everything that happens at your company, though extremely relevant to customers and others in that space, may be newsworthy
In both scenarios described above, what fits the need perfectly is the humble newsletter. In an e-mail age, it is not surprising that most of us consume news about our areas of business and interest on-line. That may also add up to an information over-kill that results in a lot of material that's not always read. Here are some approaches that may help your newsletter stand out.
- Use interesting blurbs and select limited images in the e-mail. Users can then choose to read what interests them by selecting the link
- Re-directing traffic to your site in this way, may also help guide/encourage visitors to read other relevant information. So content pages should contain relevant lead-ons
- In an on-line age, a printed copy is a sufficient oddity to actually stand out. A printed special every half year may re-kindle interest for readers
Below are some key metrics for measuring the performance of the newsletter:
Fig 3: Measuring newsletter performance |
