One of the biggest challenges of marketing communications is to track the bottom-line benefit. Marketers require, and senior executives and boards demand, an effective program of measuring and managing performance.
Tracking and measuring results is not only possible, but is an essential part of developing an effective and efficient marketing program. The best approach is to implement the following three-part process:
Planning
Following in-depth research and strategy development, the performance management program begins with:
- Defining program objectives
- Defining tasks, timing and responsibilities
- Defining measures of performance and target results
- Defining the value creation potential
Measurement
An effective measurement system will track a broad set of metrics across all channels of communication, and integrate them into a complete marketing communications performance "dashboard" that summarizes the integrated results. Example metrics include:
- Online - site analytics and pay-per-click campaign data
- Media - clipping services and circulation statistics
- Events - event publicity, attendance and post-event leads
- Publishing - open, read and click rates on email publications
- Seminars - publicity, attendance and new contacts
- One-to-one marketing - size, growth and quality of your contact databases, migration ratios through the customer life cycle, and customer lifetime value calculations
Management
The valuable measurement output must be examined and applied through periodic performance review meetings. At these sessions, the marketing communications results and their quantified bottom line impact are reviewed, and action plans agreed. This also becomes a primary input back into the performance planning process of continually refining and improving your marketing strategy and tactics.
