Six Tips for Establishing a Formal Marketing Measurement Process
There’s tremendous—and growing—interest among marketers and executive management concerning measuring the results of marketing programs. Everyone wants to demonstrate results and trim the fat around programs that aren’t generating an ROI. And we all want to make our current programs as effective as they can possibly be.
Follow the six tips below to establishing a formal measurement process, or fill in the gaps in your current strategy.
- Map out your sales process
Marketing must have comprehensive and transparent visibility into your organization’s sales process. It’s critical to ensure that measurement accurately reflects your sales process and vice versa. Any disconnect between the two will have detrimental effects on the bottom line quantification of your programs’ effectiveness. Consider teaming up with your sales counterparts and reviewing each step of the sales process, per lead category and marketing program. There’s a good chance you’ll gain new insight.
- Establish rules for lead tracking
As a component to knowing the ins and outs of your sales process, it’s essential to have clearly-defined rules and standards for tracking leads. Check for consistency. If needed, provide training for your CRM tool to ensure standardization across your organization. Any variation of these rules can lead to pitfalls that will skew your ROI results.Just like you can’t measure what you can’t track, you can’t measure leads that drop off due to poor internal communication.
- Seal up inbound and outbound processes
You may have fairly solid outbound processes. But do the inbound counterparts measure up? Make sure both outbound and inbound leads have standard processes. From the person answering the phone on up, consistency is critical. If you have a special promotion or some big push, the people on the front lines have to know about it. It’s essential to communicate promotions and specials to customer care, since they’ll get the majority of calls, regardless of the phone path you provide.
If your team isn’t armed to provide this data, you may very well be missing out on sales. Just like you can’t measure what you can’t track, you can’t measure leads that drop off due to poor internal communication on your company’s part.
- Understand criteria for lead qualifying
Is the lead qualifying criteria clear for your sales and marketing teams? Ambiguity can come back to haunt you and create conflict between sales and marketing. The characteristics of hot, warm and cold leads and any categories you have in between must be clearly articulated and understood.
- Ongoing lead management
Unfortunately, not all leads close in a timely manner. What happens to leads that don’t close within the quarter? How long do you keep hot and warm leads in your database before downgrading them, changing courses, etc.? It’s details and disciplines like these that will provide insight into your measurement process. This visibility will also keep sales and marketing working in unison toward the same goals.
- Determine tracking for multiple programs
Often a lead will come to you and/or be moved down the sales funnel due to more than one marketing program. Maybe it was a newsletter, a direct mail program and a news article. How you account for leads that come to you through multiple means? Do you have the infrastructure to track that sort of data point? If the answer to these questions isn’t an emphatic “yes,” your tracking will miss the mark.
Once seen as elusive, a formal measurement process is a manageable goal. But it takes discipline within your organization, not just within one department. It requires consistency and a commitment to ongoing quantifiable programs. Follow these steps and see just how manageable it can be.
