In Part One, we discussed how to establish targets and marketing ROI estimates for your campaigns. Today we’ll concentrate on designing your marketing programs to be measurable. This is an important topic because only the best-conceived marketing programs plan measurement strategies in advance. The strategy must answer three primary questions:
1) What will be measured?
2) When will measurements be taken?
3) How will measurements be made?
Well, what kind of specific steps do you have to take to add measurability to your marketing programs? Most experts agree that you will need to set up test groups and control groups. You also may want to vary your spending levels across different marketing channels to measure effectiveness. The general concept is that some elements within your campaigns must vary in order to sensibly model the incremental impact of your decisions.
As you plan what data to collect, you should focus on which attributes are appropriate for your marketing program. Examples of useful data included target audience, channel, message, offer, and investment level. In any event, you need to start planning data collection early in the process or reap the penalties later. Plan on collecting some data that will not be used immediately, but will be strategically valuable as your adopt more sophisticated approaches. You can stash the data in a database, a marketing automation system, even a spreadsheet.
Data collection costs money, so make careful spending decisions. You need to discriminate between easy-to-gather and valuable data. Your priorities will dictate what you measure and when you measure it, based on the need to increase your profits. It’s fine to do a little experimenting to see whether a particular metric will yield useful information. Feel free to allocate about ten percent of your budget to testing and experimentation.
Finally, remember that it’s better to collect potentially high-value insights on a periodic basis than to repeatedly measure unimportant outcomes simply because the data is easy to capture.
