Measuring Marketing Efforts

If you are interested in measuring results of marketing and PR efforts check out this fascinating article “A Powerful New Set of Public Relations Measurement Standards - This time they're based on business outcomes. By Katie Delahaye Paine

Why is this an interesting article? Because so many organizations don't or can't measure the ROI of marketing efforts!

Upon taking over the Marketing department at our company there were many surprises but perhaps the largest surprise was an astounding lack of measurement. Sure we had a hard working group of professionals, but there was virtually nothing being done to quantify results of all the hard work.

However, the more people I talked to, the more I read and studied marketing the more obvious it was that we as a company were not alone in not measuring results.

Although this article is specifically about PR, the basic concepts are certainly applicable to all types of marketing efforts. Especially these days when so much marketing is social marketing. Social marketing feels a lot like PR so the framework proposed in this article is applicable to a much larger canvas.

This article outlines measuring results on business outcomes in the following four areas:

1. Financial
2. Reputation
3. Employee
4. Public Policy
and offer measurement guidelines for outcomes related to each category.

In our company's case, in order to begin measuring anything we had to start from the beginning including defining what we should measure. We started with a multi-month effort to clean up our internal database which included removing outdated information, de-duplicating records, updating choices and creating new processes to make certain that new data being entered was clean and contained the information needed to measure results.

We trained sales team members to correctly input data they collected and built reports which were reviewed daily to identify when data was not entered correctly. We held people accountable for quality of data issues. Important point – do whatever it takes to enforce clean data going in, it is worth the effort.

As all this was happening we began reviewing our website make certain that we had the analysis tools active on every page (we used Google Analytics) and were tracking web traffic accurately.

We reviewed and updated our lead forms, to make certain we were capturing the correct information and correctly mapping that information into our database.

We chose to focus on lead generation and conversion. Were we effectively generating enough leads for our sales team and which of the leads were being converted to sales? Not rocket science but something we could all understand and communicate. Of course “creating enough leads” turned into “creating enough high quality leads” because now conversion ratios were being watched.

As always, attitudes change, efficiency and focus improves because something is being measured. People wanted to be associated with a winning campaign or idea which also meant that our ability to measure and monitor constantly improved. Everyone wanted to make certain the numbers were good. When campaigns didn’t work, we made certain to no repeat the same mistakes which saved money. We did small quick tests – which is easy with e-mail campaigns to make certain that larger efforts would return the best results.

Unfortunately, the company was sold and the team partially disbanded, Marketing was taken over by the acquiring company. However, most of the team members were retained, just repositioned mostly because they could articulate their value and results. For those who were not retained, their resumes look much better because they are able to accurately portray the result of their efforts.

We would never have been considered effective if we hadn’t been measuring results. This article and the measuring framework described, if adopted, will help a lot of people and organizations.