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Bill MullerCMOVisual IQ |
As leaders of marketing our respective organizations, we are responsible for delivering measurable business results. But many of us have teams who are struggling to manage more channels, more interactions (touchpoints), more performance data, and a more complex marketing ecosystem than ever before. How can we keep pace with the demand to collect, interpret, and act on this avalanche of information?
The following 10 steps provide an executive-level blueprint for implementing enterprise marketing measurement that will increase the quality of the measurement, analysis, and optimization you perform across your entire marketing ecosystem.
#1: Define Your Data Collection And Storage Approach
You need to decide how you are going to collect your marketing data from all of the disparate sources where it currently resides (search engines, ad networks, CRM system/customer database, in-store POS systems, in-house spreadsheets, etc.), and where you are going to consolidate and centralize your enterprisewide view of that data. Three possible data choices include:
>> In-house: This requires your IT organization to collect and manage data through the use of software, hardware, and talent that they build and maintain. An advantage to this approach is that you are not tied to a specific vendor or agency and can change partners without having to move your data.
>> Your ad agency: Working with an agency with which you already have a relationship has some advantages, but asking an agency that already is responsible for buying some of your media channels to also manage the system that will compare the effectiveness of all of your channels could result in a biased presentation or interpretation of that data.
>> A third-party provider: A number of marketing intelligence providers automate the collection and warehousing of marketing and customer data and provide interfaces to view, manipulate, and interpret that data in an unbiased way. But you need to ensure the provider has experience working with data from all of the sources you’ll be providing, is flexible enough to be able to incorporate all of your unique business rules into presentation of the data, and has data modeling capabilities.
#2: Define Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Once you decide on an option for consolidating and storing your marketing performance data, you need to define the common set of metrics to be used to measure the success of your overall marketing efforts–your KPIs. In my case these included marketing cost per qualified lead and cost per acquisition, as well as revenue and return on marketing spend. Regardless of which metrics you choose, you also must commit to calculating/reporting on the same KPIs across all of your channels or campaigns in order to compare the effectiveness of every channel/campaign in an apples-to-apples fashion.
#3: Assign Granular KPIs To Each Of Your Campaigns
Once your organization’s KPIs are defined, the next step is to assign goals and KPIs to each marketing campaign whose performance you plan to track. Defining these metrics will not only enable you to evaluate each campaign’s individual performance, but it will enable you to learn the impact of each campaign, within each channel, on every other channel/campaign, as well as its contribution to your enterprise marketing success.
#4: Establish Campaign “Attribute” Tracking
You should collect as many data points (campaign attributes) as are available from each of your data sources and include everything that is known about each campaign that could possibly have an impact on its performance, including target audience, creative, messaging, size, placement, publisher, and timing. This information will drive your eventual enterprise reporting and analysis. In my case, I track everything from the number of square feet of my booth at a given trade show to the day-parting I do with my paid search and online display ads to the version of the artwork I used on our email campaign. You should also establish how frequently you will be extracting data from every data source; the more frequently you grab and update data, the more real-time the intelligence and insights you derive from your data will be, and the quicker you can take steps to optimize future marketing efforts based on that intelligence.
Next: Sales data integration and visual scorecards.
