Planning for Marketing ROI

August 1, 2012 by
Filed under: Direct Marketing Strategy 

The best marketing programs should have measurement strategies planned in advance. So as part of planning any program, you need to answer these questions:

1.What will you measure?
2. When will you measure?
3. How will you measure?

You need to take steps to make your marketing programs measurable. This often includes doing the cumbersome tasks of setting up test and control groups or varying your spending levels across markets to measure relative impact.

Without variance in your marketing, unless you have a large bud get and a technical staff for SAS programming you may not be able to use modeling to tease apart the incremental impact of your marketing programs and improve your marketing precision and mix.

Data Collection

A key part of planning for measurement is simply tracking the appropriate attributes for all your marketing programs (and their variants). This may include target audience, message, channel, offer, investment level, and any other relevant attributes.

Project Management Meeting

Even if you don’t use the data right away, it will become invaluable down the road when you attempt any of the more sophisticated approaches towards measuring program effectiveness. These attributes can be stored in anything from your marketing automation system to a simple spreadsheet hosted on a share drive – what matters the most is that you start to build the history as early as possible.

You’ll deliver the best ROI and get the best benefits when you move past backward-looking measurement to forwardlooking
decisions.

This is the difference between marketing measurement and marketing management.
It is the difference between data, intelligence, and knowledge.

An integral part of your planning process is identifying up-front what decisions you need to make to drive company profits, and then building your measurements to capture information that facilitates these decisions.

This means you must measure things not just because they are measurable – but because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability.

Isn’t it time to swap your over-the-shoulder stance, which prevents you from moving forward efficiently, for strategic, objective.

Each measurement should seek to focus your understanding of how to make the program better and align it with your
company’s strategic objectives.

The reason is  even if you don’t meet all of your program goals, you can still figure out why and how to improve the program.

This is almost always better than launching a new program you don’t yet know anything about.

Author Bio: Tim Little – Direct Marketing My marketing process allows me to identify business problems, formulate marketing plans, initiate change, and implement effective solutions that deliver profit and returns on investments, efficiencies, and cost reductions systems.

I analyze competition to find their weaknesses and optimize my strengths. My experience includes finding leads, testing landing pages with Google AdWords, WordPress Web development and offline with list procurement, database marketing and direct mail expertise.

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