Make Your Marketing Efforts Count

For the longest time, most marketing activities were thought of as efforts that could not be measured or counted. In today’s business environment it is no longer adequate to launch campaigns that lack the structure to measure success and justify marketing activities. As marketing and sales platforms become smarter and the opportunity to feed platform-specific data to data visualization tools becomes easier, decision makers are being better armed with clear and actionable insight using data. A data-driven marketing strategy is a practice that has become expected.

Why should YOU measure your marketing impact?

• • Have a better answer than “I don’t know.” When CFO asks for the results of your the latest marketing campaign, have the concrete data to stand behind. Shed light to customer trends and behaviors that otherwise would remain in the dark.

• • Determine if campaign objectives are met. Regardless of the campaign objective – CRM, social, web, and marketing automation platforms track the key metrics to understand how a specific effort has or will influence revenue. Even better, blending multi-sourced data using data visualization tools provides more holistic visibility into how campaigns are influencing sales.

• • Understand your buyer. Successfully integrating platforms allows you to to understand the customer journey by tracking  interactions from the initial engagement to final close and beyond (retention, renewal, up-sell, cross-sell). Using data to see conversion trends allows you to plan campaigns against the stages of a customer experience which not only excels the sales effort but also, builds trust with your audience.

• • Make your life easier. Trial by error is not the strategy your CFO wants to hear for marketing. Identify which marketing touches are impacting the bottom line and prioritize those efforts.

• • Build accountability and respect. By managing and measuring marketing and sales output, you build credibility. Justify future marketing spend with hard evidence. Data is difficult to disagree with.

Big data is immense. Immense in the sense that there is so much data, marketers are struggling to escape the data title wave. To this point, 90% of the world’s data has been collected in the last two years. As a marketer there are two options, remain stagnant and drown in the flood of data, or grasp onto the opportunity that the wave of data provides and optimize your marketing efforts. How will you measure up?