February Newsletter Article

Marketing Metrics 2.0

MROI, marketing cost per order dollar, leads per marketing employee, click through rates, unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, where does it all end? The advent of Marketing Resource Management systems, web analytics tools, and sales force automation databases has perhaps simplified the task of producing marketing dashboard reports but can cloud our vision with a myriad of new useless metrics. Is this enabling us to operate marketing any smarter? With all these choices for metrics we must exert a great deal of discipline to focus our marketing resources on measuring and reporting the right variables at the right time, to be presented to the appropriate audience if we are to improve marketing performance. The dashboard is there to help you drive better, not simply so you can say "Look honey we're doing 107 MPH!".

Sometimes we have to force ourselves to refocus on the "I" in IT rather than the T. The Technology can blind us with so much data that we fail to see the Information that is truly crucial to our success. We have the ability with our web analytics engines, our Marketing Resource Management databases, and our Sales Force Automation (SFA) databases, not to mention CRMs, to produce many independent analytical views on the output of marketing activities. These tools have actually made it more difficult for marketing staff to determine the best metrics to put in an executive dashboard. A Quick poll:

The marketing metric your VP of Sales is most interested in is:
a) Click through rates for Yahoo pay-per-click ads targeting Siberia
b) Bounce rates of visitors who came from the blog of some guy in shipping
c) Leads per HQ based marketing employee not including contractors and people with comeovers (usually management or at least with management potential).
d) Number of business cards found in the iPOD Raffle fishbowl after the trade show
e) Number of qualified leads passed to Sales reps last week

Obvious right - now look at your dashboard and ask these questions:

How many of the items that are reported weekly can actually be influenced on a weekly basis? How many directly underpin the forecasted Sales results? How many show progress against a specific goal? (What, no goal? Then why are you reporting on it?) Do your reported marketing metrics agree with the SFA data that the Sales VP is staring at?

Marketing Metrics 2.0 will happen when we rise above the cloud of marketing technology that has fogged our senses in the past 5 years and recognize that having more data and dials is not the answer. We have to focus in on the right actionable information to make marketing operate more effectively. Your car doesn't need 50 dials to help you drive better, but your car's computer still reports hundreds of measurements to the auto-shop when they plug their computers into it to tune the engine periodically.

Decide what results are worthy of review weekly, monthly and quarterly based on audience, and based on how actionable the data is.

Weekly reviews
    • Audience: This is the dashboard for the marketing team 
    • Goal: Measure campaign efficacy so marketing can do their jobs better
    • Key Metrics:
        • Measure weekly trends for visitors, conversions, new leads
        • Measure qualified leads handed off to sales (the bottom line)
        • Measure conversion rates, behavioral statistics – responses to offers, interactions with you
        • Track progress against department goals
Monthly Reviews
    • Audience: Exec Staff and Marketing Staff
    • Goal: Report on marketing funnel underpinning the Sales forecast
    • Key Metrics:
        • Report on Marketing lead funnel statistics and trends
        • Relate it to the Sales funnel condition and requirements to meet forecast
        • Reconcile SFA data with Marketing data
Quarterly Reviews
    • Audience: Exec Staff and Marketing All- Hands meeting
    • Goal: Report on Marketing Effectiveness and Efficiency (ROI)
    • Key metrics:
        • Marketing cost per order dollar trends
        • Performance against goals for qualified leads
        • High level marketing campaign efficacy report including costs per lead for each campaign type and lead quality metrics
        • High Level marketing funnel report as it relates to Sales needs including database size for each of the stages, trends, and data richness
But, we don't want to get lost in the metrics from web analytics tools, marketing resource management tools and SFA databases. We must have a vision of what we are measuring and how those measurements can be used to help us make quality business decisions. There is also a risk of getting three sets of data that simply don't agree because the process for flowing lead related data from one to the other is ill defined. To avoid this you must be adamant about implementing a defined lead management process and documenting the requirements of each database being used, before moving to the development of your marketing dashboard. Presenting a mashup of cool graphs from each of these databases may appease some executive staff members but it is unlikely to help you improve marketing or sales results. Designing your various marketing reports based on your target audience and starting with the needs of your marketing and sales teams, will help you drive greater marketing success and reach Marketing Metrics 2.0 sooner and more effectively.