There is a growing trend among moms. Soccer moms as many of us have affectionately come to know them have gone mobile. It’s time to set aside what you previously knew to be the modus operandi for this segment. Moms today are highly connected, highly informed and extremely app-driven. I like to refer to them as Mobile Moms. Here is why you need to take a fresh look at today’s moms and rethink how you are communicating with them.

According to Nielsen, 1 in 3 Americans own a smartphone. Combined tablet and smartphone sales will exceed desktop and notebook computers in 2011 based on a Morgan Stanley February 2011 research study. According to Babycenter’s 21st Century Mom 2011 Mobile Mom Report, Moms are 18% more likely to own a smartphone than the general population. Moms are mobile power users according to the Babycenter Report. They find value in their smartphones for entertainment (games, social, music), information (weather and health) as well as shopping on her mobile.

The Babycenter report also indicates that when it comes to health, Moms are 50% more likely than the general population to use apps for tracking health and fitness. 80% love looking up wellness information on their phone. If you are a healthcare provider, you need to understand this and get your brand on their smartphone in the form of an app, an ad or a text message. Somehow you need to connect with moms on mobile.

Take a close look at your website on a smartphone. Do you have to zoom in to read it? Can you easily tap links to navigate using your thumb? Answering no to either of these questions means you need to think about a mobile-ready website.

Moms love to shop and their smartphones prove to be a shopping utility. When on the go and at retail stores, moms rely on their phones to aid in the shopping. 46% of moms find the most convenient time to get information about a product is when they are right there shopping for it. Of those that shop with their smartphones, 62% are using shopping apps (data from Babycenter Report). Are you a retailer or e-tailer? What is the experience you are providing moms when they visit your site on their phone? How are you connecting with them in store using technology and mobile devices?

Moms rely heavily on their mobile phone to access their social networks. They are 38% more likely than the general population to use their smartphone for social networking. They use their social networks to socialize and for entertainment as well as to listen to what other moms are discussing and to aid in making decisions. Have you begun reaching moms via social networks? Have you thought about how to integrate social and mobile to get your brand in front of moms and their social networks? If not, you are missing incredible opportunities.

So what are the implications? If you are a marketer and you need to connect with and win over the mom community, you need to factor mobile into your mix. This can take many shapes. It can range from mobile ads to apps to mobile optimized websites. It could also include SMS messaging and many other ideas. The bottom line is this audience segment is prime for a mobile connection. How can a marketer act on this? Begin understanding the types of tools that a mom could use to help improve her life when on the go. She does not have a lot of time to do in-depth research. Give her an app to help aid in her decision process – whether looking for a pediatrician or a new pair of shoes. Of course, these are two different apps we’re talking about. The point is to begin thinking about apps. Start small and grow it.

Other actions you can take are to begin collecting opt-ins to receive text alerts. What type of an alert would your audience desire? In retail, perhaps it is an alert about an upcoming sale. In healthcare it might be reminders for appointments or flu shots. Take a close look at your website. How is it to read on a smartphone? If you can’t read it without zooming in and can’t tap the links with your thumb, you need to think about making it mobile-ready.

Give moms the mobile experience they deserve including mobile-ready sites, text alerts, apps that improve their lives and cater to their ‘on-the-go’ lifestyle. In return, moms will give you their praise, their business as your customer and their loyalty. Want to learn more? Read about our mobile application capabilities. Sign up for our enewsletter – PinPoints. Or, contact us today.

Flickr image courtesy of Fifth World Art.

A common challenge marketers face is that they have data from various campaigns that reside in disparate systems.  In order to make meaning out of the data and gain insights about marketing performance, the data needs to be merged.  To add to the complexity, marketing organizations often use different systems than sales organizations making it more challenging to connect the dots between marketing investments and sales activity that it helps drive.

What’s a marketer to do?  Here are several ideas to help create closed loop systems along with the rationale why they are beneficial.  All of the suggestions within are meant to help understand what is failing and what is working in an effort to optimize campaigns.

1. Create a system that allows all key constituents to access the same key metrics.  Use the key metrics to derive data driven insights and continually improve performance (websites, campaigns, email, seo, ppc, etc.).  I know, blah, blah, blah.  What does this mean?  Its so vague.  It means that anyone in your organization, regardless of their department, can access a dashboard or reporting system to see how marketing campaigns perform.  Within the system there are key insights that drive action.  If a campaign is failing to meet its goals, you can see it is failing.  You can drill down deeper to see what might be causing it to fail.  Same for the campaigns that work.
2. Develop a system that closes the loop between marketing and sales.  The system should demonstrate how many sales are generated and associate the sale back to the lead source along with campaign metrics such as cost, exposure, response rates, and break it down by offer, message, creative, medium, etc.
3. Focus on key, actionable metrics.  Having data and reports for the sake of measuring is a futile effort.  You need to identify the metrics that matter to your organization.  Is it time on site?  Is it videos viewed?  Perhaps white papers downloaded?  Sample requests?  Online sales?  Visits and pageviews don’t give you much to go by in terms of actionable data.  What matters is behavior.  Driving a call to action.  Making the phone ring.
4. Always test.  As marketers, we are never done tweaking, refining and making things better.  When you find something that is working, test another version or message to see whether it can work better.  Test a different list.  Test a different call to action.  Never stop testing and learning.  If you are not testing, you’ll never improve performance.
5. Incorporate anecdotal evidence of success and failures into results (customer feedback, client feedback, agency feedback, vendor feedback).  Don’t rely on empirical data alone from web analytics, third party ad serving, social media insights, call tracking etc.  Factor in the feedback you receive from internal constituents, social media comments, vendor feedback.  These data points are important to round out the results of a campaign.  They add flavor and context to the learning.
6. Did I say test.  I can’t say it enough.  Always test.  Learn from tests.  Grow.  Don’t be afraid to fail. Failing is where we often learn our greatest lessons.
7. Converse to failing, don’t only look at what went wrong.  Look at what went right and figure out how to socialize that across other campaigns, business units, tactics, etc.

If you are not measuring your marketing today, how are you making decisions around your marketing investments?  If you are measuring your marketing, are you troubled by having many systems that don’t ‘talk’ to one another?  Start small.  Find ways to integrate.  Test.  Learn. Refine.  Rinse and Repeat.

Flickr photo courtesy of OliverN5

If you use email marketing to communicate with your customer base or for prospecting, you probably pay close attention to open rates, click through rates, and most importantly conversion rates.  You know by now that changes to subject lines, calls to action and offers can make a difference in the performance of a campaign.  Other factors can have an impact as well such as send time (day/time), your list, your email service provider (ESP), and more.

So, you know all this.  What’s broken?

What’s broken is the general approach of “one to many” when sending email campaigns.  Like you (and the rest of the connected world), I am on many email lists.  I get the same emails that you all get. Okay, well maybe I don’t get the emails from Modern Plastics and Polymers or Bird Watchers Digest. But if I were on these lists, chances are we’d be getting the same version of emails.  Why are we getting the same versions?  We’re different people with different preferences.  Just because we both love birds, does not mean we love the same birds.  Or, that we both want to go on bird watching trips.

To be effective and make use of advanced segmentation, emails need to be viewed as “one to one”.  By one to one, I mean personal.  The more advanced, sophisticated ESP’s such as Silverpop make this possible.  Through preference databases and list segmentation, brands can get to know and communicate with their customers and prospects much more intimately.  No, I don’t mean that kind of intimate.

By intimate, I am suggesting that we allow our customers to tell us their preferences.  What are their likes and interests?  Why are they signing up to receive email from us?  How are they reading emails?  On a laptop? On a phone?  On an iPad?  All of the above? By collecting this information you’ve accomplished the first step towards improving your email marketing.  Now you need to do something with it.  You need to segment the data you’ve collected and craft email messages that are relevant and compelling to your segments.  Hone in on segments of your list that prefer to hear about bird watching trips and send them relevant information and offers.  For those that would rather learn about bird watching without traveling, send them videos or some other, preferred method of consuming bird content.

Why is all this important?  Because you are taking the time and energy to communicate with your customers and you are communicating what you think is important, not what your customers think is important.  If you are going to send emails and accept an industry average open rate and click through rate, then you’ll be stuck at the same performance level until you decide to make this change.  Your emails are competing for share of mind with 10-20 other commercial emails per day.  This is on top of all the business correspondence email and personal email your customers receive and respond to.  If you are not relevant to your customer, you’ll be deleted.  If you are not deleted, you’ll be ignored.  In today’s email world, ignored means being prioritized downwards.  If your customer uses an email service such as gmail, you’ll be in the bottom of the inbox and lucky to be seen.

So you are asking where to start?

Build a preference center.  Drive your email list to that preference center.  Gather information about them.  What they like, desire and maybe even their birth date.  Send an email with birthday wishes.  I bet they’ll open it.  Surprise them with a special birthday offer.  Send loyalty emails to your best customers that order from you regularly.  Find out their social media preferences and engage with them via social media as well.

You can’t keep sending “one to many” emails and expect to be successful.  If you do continue down the one to many path, all you can count on is to be extinct.

Flickr photo courtesy of emilykbecker

Several people have been credited with the saying: “Seek first to understand, then be understood.”

A quick Google search gives credit to Steven Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People so I’ll go with it here. What Covey and many others are trying to impress on us is the idea that until you understand who you are communicating with in terms of motivations, desires, interests, preferences and their overall being, you can’t expect them to understand you.

As marketers, we want to communicate what makes us great. Why our brand, product or service is better than the competition. But how do we know we’re better? Is it based on our research of the competition? Is it based on a room of marketing and product managers developing rationale for why we’re better than the next guy?

If this is how you are developing your communication strategy, your process is broken.

You need to first listen to what your customers and prospective customers have to say before you can begin to apply any brain cells towards how you’ll market your brand. The key idea here is to listen. Listen to interests. Listen to needs. Listen to motivations. Listen to dislikes. Listen to challenges. Listen to preferences.

By listening and understanding your audiences, you can then start thinking about how to position your brand. How to connect with your audiences. How to communicate with them. How to motivate them to respond and take action.

Instead of speaking in a language based on what you and your marketing team think is relevant and important to your audience, you’ll now be speaking a language that is relevant to them. A language they understand. One they want to respond to. One that understand them, their needs, their interests, their desires. Couple this approach with the competitive landscape and your unique brand offerings and you’ll be speaking a language your audience understands and will drive a return on your marketing investments.

Flickr photo courtesy of orkomedix

Do you manage email marketing campaigns? If you do, you’ll want to read this.

Email marketing comes in many sizes and flavors. There are monthly newsletters, promotional offers or coupons or special announcements. No matter what type of commercial emails you send, you can always improve the process and the results.

The focus of this post is how to make mid, to large scale programs more efficient. If you manage multiple lists and multiple templates, chances are you spend a lot of time on repetitive tasks. This is costing you precious time and creating opportunities for error. Maybe you have an email marketing agency managing this for you. How are they managing the process? What steps in the process can you remove in order to gain efficiency and accuracy?

Here are a few things you can do to improve:

1. Streamline the internal communications process of receiving email content. If you manage a monthly program for multiple store locations or internal divisions of a company, create a better process of collecting the monthly specials, offers or events. Suppose you have 50 or 100 stores that send you their monthly offers. Create an online form where they need to submit their information. Set due dates so you can manage expectations. If your internal customers are not able to submit their information by a due date, their email will not go out on time.
2. Consolidate send dates. Rather than sending 50 or 100 email campaigns per month, send one or two. This can be done by creating templates and using relational tables. There is some up-front work that needs to be done to set up the tables and load in content but this will save hours down the road by not having to deploy email sends over and over again through the month. Using relational tables allows you to send campaigns once or twice a month and the store specific images, and content will be pulled into the template in real-time.
3. Don’t be afraid of templates. Solutions such as Silverpop allow email marketers to create templates that preserve the unique nature and brand characteristics of individual stores or divisions.
4. Manage expectations. When email programs grow and need to scale, you need to introduce this type of process so you can manage expectations. If 100 sites are sending you their monthly promotional information on their own schedule, you won’t be able to keep up with timely campaigns. Chances are you will be sending campaigns late and not meeting expectations. Having scheduled send dates once or twice per month while leveraging technology such as relational tables allows you to manage expectations. Your internal customers will know when their campaigns deploy and when they need to sumbit information to allow time for writing, loading, testing and deployment.

Remember, email marketing does not have to be labor intensive. Templates are not a bad thing. Use templates and relational tables. Cut down on manual entry and inefficiencies. Create more accurate work. Use technology and smarter process to be more efficient and get better results. You’ll save time, money and have internal customers that are satisfied with your service, and the results you produce. With the internal or agency time you save, you can reinvest those budget dollars into other marketing vehicles that you’ve been wanting to test and grow your business.

Looking to improve your email marketing process or results? Give us a shout.

Flickr image courtesy of jessedybka

For reasons I can’t explain, many B2B marketers, including manufacturers, are unwilling to embrace or even test search engine marketing.  Its hard to deny the facts around how valuable of a communication channel search engines have become.  According to MarketingProfs, search marketing is the leading marketing tactic in terms of it’s growing effectiveness over time. On the flip side, trade print media is the tactic that is showing declining returns at the most significant rate. Some interesting points that lie beneath these stats are that most of the trade publications that support the manufacturing space have shifted their business models towards online content engines.

To support their growth and readership base, guess where the trade pubs turn?  You got it. Search engines.  As I regularly speak with representatives from several trade publications I’ve learned their tactics have evolved when it comes to acquiring readers and new eyeballs.  Trade pubs used to rely on blow-in cards and direct mail to grow their readership. Today, they still use these tactics however they’ve come to rely more and more on e-marketing such as email and search engines.

The reason for bringing this up is to demonstrate that if search engines are a good source for publications to acquire readers, why can’t a manufacturer do this directly themselves?  Go direct to the eyeballs you want rather than through a trade publication or website.  Yes, there is still value in advertising and distributing your message via trade media.  If you manufacture a product and have a B2B audience, you can create content and distribute it via search engines just like the trade media is doing.

The search engines have leveled the playing field and enabled disintermediation.  Rather than having to rely on the trade media to find the eyeballs you want, you can get in the game yourself and go direct to the well – search engines.  To go a step further, the same applies to email marketing and other digital marketing tactics.

You must first understand your audience.  What are their needs?  Interests?  What makes them tick?  How do they spend their day? Next, build a content strategy to leverage these insights.  Put your content online.  Set it up to be found – SEO, Paid Search, Social Media, Email Marketing and so on.

Its time to take advantage of the fact that your target audience is online.  They are on search engines.  They read email.  They are using social media more and more.  Create the content your audience desires and will value.  Then be found when they are looking for information on your industry, products or services.  When executed well, this strategy will enable you to create your own platform to distribute content, keep prospects and customers engaged, create value and rely less upon others to gain access to your target audience.

To learn more about how Point to Point can assist with developing the insights and strategies to connect with audiences through search engine marketing, give us a shout.

Much has been written recently about the proposed Do Not Track bill that will allow web users to opt out of being tracked online.  As I consider the implications of this bill, I am preparing myself for irrelevance.  We’ve made such great progress developing technology that makes our web experiences more personalized and relevant. Implementing a Do Not Track requirement will force several steps backwards.  Steps back towards less relevance for users and lovers of marketing analytics.

Behavioral marketing is made possible with the very technologies that Do Not Track wants to control.  For example, ads you see online today are relevant to you because of cookies.  Without cookies, you’ll begin seeing ads that you have less interest in.  And, it does not end with ads.  Your search history is at stake.  Search results which just about all of us have come to rely on to find useful, relevant information will become less relevant.

When you do a search on a topic, that information is stored for future use in order to make your subsequent searches more relevant to you.  With Do Not Track, the search engines will not be able to store data that enables relevance.

Other potential implications involve the storage of data that personalizes your online experience.  You may  find yourself needing to enter passwords every time you visit certain websites.

While these changes may sound trivial to some, they have significant financial implications for marketers as well.  By improving the targeting of advertisements, the ads have better performance which creates efficiencies in ad buys.  More efficient ad buys means more competitive pricing when it comes to the products we buy.

While this proposed bill has some similarities in relation to Do Not Call, it is not the same thing.  It can’t be compared as it is designed to serve a completely different purpose and it will be administered much differently.  As noted above, the implications are also much different.  Do Not Call limits marketers from calling you.  Do Not Track limits web tracking.  These are two very different things.

Regardless of how you view this potential bill, there is no debating the impact this will have to the relevance of our web experiences.  To Congress, the FCC, the FTC and any others involved in the proposed legislation, I strongly urge you to rethink Do Not Track.

Flickr image courtesy of Gopal1035

You have a business and sell stuff.

Congratulations.

Chances are you have a website as a way for people to learn about your company, your products and services.  Do you know how people find your website and how they contact you?  Do you want to know what marketing and advertising is working and what’s not working?  There are several ways to gain these insights.  One key tactic is call tracking.  Call tracking is key whether you sell to consumers, or B2B.  It does not matter if you sell paint, insurance, furniture, food products, lighting, or widgets.

If you manage a website and you don’t track your call volume, you may be suffering from myopia.  Web analytics myopia that is.  You see, you’re only able to see the results of a portion of your marketing efforts.  Call tracking is a critical component of a successful marketing analytics system. There are many flavors of call tracking, several of which have become much more robust recently due to advances in technology.

Recent advancements allow call tracking at the organic keyword level.  Using unique phone numbers at the keyword level is a bit too granular for many companies but consider the benefits.  By understanding call volume and outcomes at the keyword level, you’ll capture conversion data that you may not see through only web form conversions.

Certain keywords may have a higher likelihood to generate a phone call vs. a web form depending on the intention of the search.  For example, someone might search a general term related to your product or service that brings them to your website.  They may not be ready to commit yet so they don’t fill out a form but are comfortable with a call.  If they are in the information gathering stage of their search, they may pick up the phone to call.  The call may be prompted by lack of information found on your website or simply wanting to speak to a rep from your company.  If you are tracking just web forms, you’ll miss these conversions.

Taking call tracking a step further can be accomplished using call recording.  Speech recognition technology can be used to understand the outcomes of the calls generated from an ad.  Using keywords in the speech recognition process, advertisers can understand whether calls generate leads or sales and the associated value of sales.  If speech recognition is a bit much for you, consider using call recording for training and call quality.  In several cases, we’ve worked with clients using call recording to identify opportunities to improve the call experience and have implemented actionable training that led to higher conversion rates.  By randomly auditing recorded calls, you’ll find areas to improve through ongoing training.

Underscoring the importance of call tracking is comScore research that indicates up to 63% of people complete their purchase offline following their search activity.  Sure, some portion of these are people that visit a bricks and mortar store.  The remainder pick up the phone and call.  So, almost two-thirds of people searching online and visiting websites are not using the web to make contact or buy directly online.

There are many potential reasons why people are not buying from you online or contacting you using your web forms.  Below are several reasons this may be the case.  Take a look at your sales process, your competitors, and your website to understand which of these may apply to your company and website.

1. Your website does not have the information necessary to complete an online transaction.
2. Your website does not convey the trust that a consumer or B2B buyer wants and needs to trust giving their information.
3. Many people simply don’t like to use web forms to supply their information.  It could be due to privacy or security.  They may not want their information sold or used for other marketing purposes that typically results when completing web forms.
4. They are not ready to commit and prefer to make an anonymous phone call to get information from your company about your products or services.
5. You are not offering the ability for the web visitor to contact you through a form or email.
6. Your website navigation or content makes it difficult for the visitor to find the information necessary to make an online transaction.
7. Your website simply can’t answer every question that every visitor might have.  As hard as you try to develop content and FAQ’s that you  think addresses everyone’s needs, you’ll never think of them all.

If all this is not enough to convince you that call tracking is important, consider that one of the most successful companies online is now in the call tracking business.  That’s right, the big GOOG has done it again and introduced a new way to be accountable and prove their worth.

Google recently announced their plans to get in the call tracking game.  Until Google proves this out and collects enough data, these calls won’t have an associated cost.  It is likely only a matter of time until the GOOG starts charging advertisers per call.  Using Google Voice, they are providing unique phone numbers that a consumer can call to respond to an ad on Google.  With this feature, Google is able to prove more value associated with ads run on their network because it goes beyond just clicks.

Remember, there are several flavors of call tracking.  It can be done to track as granular as the keyword level from an organic search or simply at a campaign level.  It can be used to track offline advertising as well as online ads.  Call tracking works for both search ads and display ads online.  You can choose to record calls or not.

Regardless of what flavor you choose, the benefits will be the same. You’ll know when a consumer calls to find out more about an event you are promoting through an online ad.  You’ll know when a foodservice customer calls to buy a new product for their catering business based on an email blast you recently sent out.  You’ll know when an architect contacts you to receive product samples due to an online campaign.

Interested in learning more about how Point to Point can assist with your call tracking?  Give us a call at 866-979-5822.  Not interested in calling? No worries, you can find our form here.

Flickr image courtesy of randomduck.

Lets say you are male and somewhere between the ages of 18-34 years old. Lets also say you are into cars. You like to drive cars, fix cars, read (online and offline) about how cars perform, and you’ve bought a few cars. Your car is your prized possession and you baby it. Lets also assume you are not into movies. You’ve never cared much for movies, except maybe for movies about cars.

Knowing you are between 18-34 years old, you have a high tendency to use the Internet to research cars, read about cars and you post content and comments on sites about your favorite subject – cars. Now that we know a bit about you, lets talk about what is relevant to you.

You go online frequently and visit sites such as caranddriver.com, motortrend.com and other car sites. You are leaving a trail of bread crumbs all over the web about who you are and your interests. When you visit other sites, perhaps news related sites, you see ads. These ads might be about movie – something you don’t care much about. You don’t click these ads. You don’t pay attention to these ads. You don’t go on to visit the movie’s website at a later time.

The GOOG has been working hard to build a system that is designed to flip this scenario on its head. No, they are not trying to get you to click on the movie website. The Google Display Ad Network will be smart enough to know that you are a car enthusiast and when you visit a news site or non-car site, they will serve you an ad about cars. The ad might even be for motortrend.com since you’ve been to motortrend.com. If it is raining outside while you are visiting the news site, the ad might be for windshield wipers or tires that offer better traction in the rain, in your specific location (e.g. Cleveland, Chicago, etc.).

If you run a company that sells things (what company does not) or are responsible for marketing a product, you know that targeting is a key driver of results. You want to target a specific audience that will consider and buy your product. This is a relevance game. If you are into cars, you don’t want to see an ad for a movie. If you are in Cleveland and it is raining, an ad for a car driving the coastline in southern California is less relevant than one driving in the rain that talks about Cleveland. Showing an ad that is geo targeted and talks about the current weather conditions increases relevance. Higher relevance equals better results.

Relevance is the name of the game with the Google Display Ad Network. They are not the only company doing this. Retargeting, geo-targeting and relevance is going on elsewhere. The difference with Google is they have the in-house tools to package with their network to help you understand how the ads are performing, how they impact search results and vice-versa, can be bought in real-time and give you the insights to make smart ad buying decisions.

Again, if you are trying to sell something whether windshield wipers or widgets, you want your ads to be seen by the very people that are interested in them and have a higher likelihood to buy your products.  Using tools such as those offered by the Google network, you can test different placements, retargeting and get the insights necessary to make your campaigns a success and be accountable.  You’ll know where success is coming from and where results fall short.  You can optimize your spending to improve results and gain efficiencies.

To learn more about how we can help you navigate the waters of targeted online media planning and buying, measuring the results of advertising or if you want to see a movie with us, give us a shout today.

Flickr photo courtesy of hdc.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with many marketers in the building products sector.  A common topic of conversation related to their marketing is how they can better understand the effectiveness of their marketing investments.  In most cases, the best way to get a handle on marketing’s effectiveness at generating leads and sales is measured by sales data such as leads and conversions and connecting this activity back to costs.  This is exactly where the challenge typically exists in most organizations.  Marketing and sales are not working together to allow the deep insights necessary to understand marketing effectiveness.

Marketers that desire to better understand marketing effectiveness exist across many types of organizations.  However, building products manufacturers face unique challenges as they must get a grasp on how a variety of constituents are interacting with their brands and products.  For example, when an architect specifies a product in his or her design process, that specification data can precede the project being developed by months, if not years.  Connecting the specification data to a sale presents unique challenges.

On the other end of the spectrum, when a contractor works from the specification, there exists an opportunity to change the product selection, although this happens at a relatively low frequency and will vary depending on the type of product and project.  Gaining an understanding of products used in a project relative to the original specification requires access to specification data and building project data.

Many marketers acknowledge these unique challenges in the architectural and design community, however there are systems and databases in place that can allow for building product manufacturers to measure and analyze marketing effectiveness over time.  So, why are most of the BPM marketers not measuring effectiveness?  It has not been made a priority within their organizations.

Like in many cases, things start from the top and work their way down.  Senior management needs to make marketing analytics and ROI a priority and charge their sales and marketing groups to work together to solve this problem.  The marketing and sales teams must then be held accountable for budgets and ROI.

Here is my road map to getting started towards developing more measurement and insight towards marketing effectiveness for building product manufacturers (although this applies to many B2B organizations).

1. Start at the top – Presidents, CEO’s, CFO’s, CMO’s, COO’s, GM’s, you know who you are.  This group first needs to make it a priority to understand marketing effectiveness.
2. Invest – again, this starts at the top but when a priority is set, investments can be made in the resources necessary to measure effectiveness.
3. Collaborate – Okay, business leaders have given the marching orders to figure out the ROI on your marketing and handed you a check to develop the systems.  Its time to play nice and share the sand box.  Marketing and sales need to come together to make this happen.  If the two groups don’t work together, the process won’t work.  Make a pact and get started.
4. Identify your key metrics – this can include any combination of the following or others that you find appropriate:  third party project reports such as Dodge, specifications written, specification downloads from your website or third party spec sites, request for information (online forms, and phone leads), orders, sales, and associated cost per each of these metrics where the marketing cost is divided by each of the key metrics.
5. Find the human resources (e.g., analyst types) that can create a process and system to capture the data that feeds key metrics.  This includes identification and implementation of the systems and technology to capture the data.
6. Implement in baby steps – this is an huge undertaking to go from having no analytics to putting a full dashboard in place.  Prioritize and implement in phases.  Start with the top of the marketing funnel and work your way downwards.  Bottom line is be realistic about how much you can accomplish and by when, then implement in chunks.  Get small wins and build on them.
7. Close the loop – marketing and sales must communicate to one another about how much is being invested and where.  Sales needs to communicate back in terms of what is working and what is not working.  Use this as your opportunity to improve and make your marketing better.

The time to start this process is now as budgets continue to be highly scrutinized and ROI must be demonstrated.  The more efficient you can be with your marketing dollars by optimizing spending towards more effective channels will create a more successful business outcome.  You’ll have an edge on the competition that does not have the deep insights and solid working relationship and communication between marketing and sales.

If you question the value of this type of activity then marketing analytics are not yet a priority in your organization.  I would argue they need to be.  For more rationale on why this is a priority, see my post that explains in very simple terms how to determine the value of knowing your marketing ROI.