As the legendary basketball coach John Wooden once said – “Never mistake activity for achievement.”

How are you evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns?  Every company has a marketing budget, but how is that budget spent and are you spending the limited money you have in the most effective way possible?  These are difficult questions to answer for most companies, and for good reason.  It is often difficult to fully make the correlation between a series of marketing campaigns and qualified leads which eventually lead to a sale.  Furthermore, without this being an automated process, that’s presented in a visual manner, this data could be rendered useless or overcome by other events by the time it’s available and analyzed.

Since it’s difficult to effectively measure true ROI in real time, many marketing departments use easily-quantifiable numbers to evaluate marketing campaigns (i.e. sent X amount of e-mails, had Y amount of clicks, and asked the sales team to follow up on Z amount of “leads”).  This is a better evaluation tool than nothing at all. However, it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story, because it doesn’t factor in the most important piece of any marketing campaign: “Did this help our company realize additional revenue?”   Additional revenue is achievement; number of e-mails opened is activity.

Many companies know:

• Who their customers are
• Which prospects they’ve reached out to
• All of the ways they’ve reached out to them
• Whether that prospect became a customer
• How much that customer purchased

The challenge many companies face is that the people and systems that have all this information don’t communicate in an automated, graphical way.  Having a clean, centralized database which incorporates feeds from transactional data, CRM and campaign information is the first step in changing this.  On top of the data integration, it’s also important to have an easy-to-use interface to run reports and to provide business decision makers with useable data in real time.

The data that you already have can help you pay more attention to achievement, not just the activity.  Or as my father used to say on our family’s tree farm – “It ain’t how much time you spend in the woods, it’s how much firewood you carry out.”

For more info on how to automate and measure the firewood you’re hauling, click here.

About the author

Marty Maynard is a Sales Engineer at SIGMA Marketing Insights.

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