1 Nov
There is a place for gut instinct in marketing, but relying on that to develop next year’s marketing plan is not it. Although you may have traditionally determined next year’s marketing budget and strategy based on the previous year, this alone won’t save you from potential cuts.
Now is a prime time to demonstrate your marketing savvy by measuring your efforts. The reasons are many: good measurement can be motivational, it makes you more effective, demonstrates your willingness to be accountable, shows good business sense, and in some cases can increase your compensation.
Let me give you an example of thinking through marketing priorities and setting up good measurement. Recently a client called because she was trying to determine if she should spend $12,000 to attend a national conference. On the surface it looked like it held a lot of great opportunity. The conference was well attended (even in this slump), she had few direct competitors attending and she’d received some recent good public relations that she wanted to continue.
We went through the numbers, starting with the demographics. Half of the attendees were from companies too large for her small company to effectively sell into. Of the remaining, a third were not in the right department. We kept slicing through the data until we could reasonably see that about 10-15% of attendees could be in her target market. If the conference got the 2,000 attendees it planned for, that’s only 200-300 people she could target. She would have to rely on those people finding her booth in the exhibit hall.
Although she can offer her services nationally, her company is better at closing sales in the local area. If what she really wants is qualified leads in her local area, she can take a fraction of the money she would spend on the conference and use it to buy a mailing or calling list. She could even afford to pay someone to qualify leads and set up sales appointments. Furthermore, she could easily track the number of calls made, the leads acquired, the sales meetings set up and the number of new customers. Because she’s savvy about technology, she can pair this calling campaign with an email campaign to increase the number of leads; she can then track the messages that result in the best response.
We often see clients who don’t think through the demographics, impact and likelihood of success in their marketing efforts. They go to tradeshows because they went last year, sponsor events because a partner in the firm likes that event, keep advertising because they’ve always been in that publication, target national publications for prestige when local publications would have more sales impact, and make other emotional marketing choices.
However, using actual demographic measurements will help them set up future measurements to identify their best campaigns.
What Can You Measure?
Besides leads and hard sales data, there’s a wealth of information you can measure to see how well your marketing efforts are doing. Here are some of the objectives you can measure:
To show how this works together, we created a chart that gives the marketing objective desired, the mediums used, and the measures that can be taken to see if the efforts are successful (see end of article for link).
When you’re measuring the ROI of an online marketing effort, remember to include the cost of all time spent on it by members of your firm. This is often a hidden cost of online projects that seem free at first glance. While it might be hard to measure the “return” portion of ROI at first, be alert for prospects, referral sources and clients talking about the information they found on your site or blog. If you have an interactive website, electronic newsletter, blog, LinkedIn Group or other online effort, the comments and dialog generated are an important ROI measure that will increase the likelihood of referrals, sales and client loyalty.
What follows is a list of some important measures you can use to determine the effectiveness of your efforts in 2009. Now is also the time to build measures into your campaigns for 2010. When you think about how you’ll measure your efforts on the front end, it creates stronger marketing overall.
Important Measures
Conversation Index – This is a measure of the number of comments you get per blog post (whether on your blog or as a guest on someone else’s blog). An average of one comment per post is good. Less than that and you’re at the dangerously low ebb of relevance, more than that and you’re probably rising in the blog rankings.
Rankings – Speaking of blog rankings, you can look on blog ranking sites like Technorati (technorati.com) or search for a phrase like “top accounting blogs” to find sites that rank the top blogs in your industry or niche.
Statistics – You can use services like Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/index.html) to determine who’s visiting your site, where they’re coming from and where they’re spending the most time. This is very valuable for determining what you’re doing right so you can do more of it.
Reputation & Quality – This measure looks at what people say when they talk about you. Rather than counting how often you’re mentioned in blogs and industry conversations, this measure counts how often the mention is on message for your firm’s key messages.
Influential Ideas – If one of your partners uses a catchy law phrase in a blog interview and a few days later you see it repeated in other influential online conversations, you’ve just won at this measure.
Looking for the chart?
Click here to view our PDF newsletter (reference page 3).
1 Nov
Everyone is still trying to figure out ways to use Twitter for business development. Is it more work than it’s worth? For some, Twitter has become the main way that they communicate. Others resist the push to get “Twitterpated” (fall in love with short status updates?)
Here’s more food for thought from our own growth consultant Kristy Gusick and other voices in the Twitter debate:
Promote your content. Using Tiny URL translators like “bit.ly,” you can “tweet” a news article, newsletter or blog you’ve posted online. Sending people to your website boosts SEO.
Use Twitter to stay informed. Find people to follow who are credible and connected in your industry. Use that timely intelligence when meeting with prospects.
Follow referral sources. Use the “find people” link to search for them and follow them.
Follow competitors. This is a great way to find out quickly what they are thinking about, working on or promoting — long before they advertise it. They can choose to block you, but it doesn’t happen often.
Create warm leads. Thank people who follow you. “Retweet” their content if it would be helpful to your network. Follow relevant people who are following you.
Gather intelligence. Use Twitter to perform an informal survey to get feedback on a new product or service idea, an article or blog post…or just something you’re wondering about.
An active Twitter presence can take just minutes a day, but we recommend that you leverage available free software to make the job even easier. Some popular programs like minggl (minggl.com) and FriendFeed (friendfeed.com) allow you to get all updates in one place and update your status across multiple sites simultaneously. For tips on building a searchable Twitter bio, visit Web Worker Daily at http://ow.ly/BHMH.