How to Measure Marketing Results in a Complex, Multi-channel World
Business-to-business marketers are always looking for ways to demonstrate our value, explain the contribution of our activities and justify budgets. Just talking about image and awareness won’t cut it when our management is talking revenue and market share. To sustain ourselves, we have to be sure we can directly link our activity to solid business results – and that means sales.
The most reliable way to show results is by setting up our marketing programs to drive sales leads. With responses, we can qualify the customer’s interest, pass the lead to a salesperson, and track the lead to an actual revenue outcome. This way, marketing campaigns can be evaluated on an ROI basis or, at the very least, show some revenue that helps defray their cost.
In the complex, multichannel world of B-to-B marketing – when marketing programs are often only asked to drive awareness and consideration – campaigns can still be set up to link directly to sales. Most B-to-B awareness campaigns today include an 800 number or a Web address where customers can go for more information. It’s important to put aside budget for a response management process that will capture and manage these inquiries, close the loop and demonstrate credible revenue.
But it’s often difficult to tie marketing activity to actual sales, especially when the buying process is long and there are many parties involved. Here are seven techniques that can help. Each has something to contribute to the mix – and some limitations.
- Closed loop. Many B-to-B firms operate elaborate “closed-loop” processes to accomplish tracking. This approach can be powerful, but it’s expensive. A closed-loop system tries to track each qualified lead to its end result, whether closure, rejection or loss to competition. This means a lot of hand work: contacting the sales person individually and asking straight out for reporting on the results. Sales people are busy and they need to focus on selling (and we certainly don’t want to get in their way), so hounding them can be an exercise in frustration. Closed loop works best on high-value products and services, but because it usually under-reports results, it needs to be supplemented by other techniques.
- End user sampling. Surveying end users who were promoted in the campaign can provide excellent results. It’s inexpensive and reliable (if you’ve brought in the statisticians to bless your methodology), and it captures actual sales from multiple channels. In one case, IBM identified enough sales through an end-user survey to indicate that a campaign was three times more successful than the revenue results shown through their standard closed-loop process.
But there is some pain in surveying: It costs money, and not all campaigns are willing to plan and budget for it. And the survey needs to be executed carefully to avoid annoying customers.
- Data matchback. Analyzing the sales into accounts that have been promoted is an approach that has been used for years, and particularly suits high-volume campaigns like catalog sales or consumer products. It is not suited to marketers who rely on distribution channels, unless they can persuade their channels to share revenue data from their end-user accounts. Another problem is that it records all sales into the account, and is thus likely to overstate the sales that result from any particular campaign. Politically, it’s truly dangerous for marketers to make large claims for campaign sales results. All that does is alienate the sales force, who are convinced it was entirely their skill and persistence that got the business.
- Control groups. This is the ideal solution in a mail-order environment, but just about impossible to implement in our complex world. A control group sets aside a set of customers who won’t see the campaign, and compares sales in these accounts versus a set of similar accounts who were promoted. This can work pretty well for long-term, multi-tactic campaigns, like loyalty programs. But for most campaigns that use multiple media, it’s very hard to fence off any customer set reliably. Beyond the mere executional issues, it’s hard to justify leaving money on the table by supressing high-potential prospects.
- Exclusive offers. When you can create an offer that is only promoted in that campaign, all the sales can be credibly attributed to the campaign itself. Similarly, coupons redeemable through distribution channels but funded by the marketer allow reliable tracking of campaign results. This is best suited to single-tactic campaigns for products with short sales cycles.
- Product registration. Here’s the ultimate end-user sampling technique. Most registration systems ask the customer to indicate where or when they bought, and some ask what influenced their purchase decision. But it’s hard to link registration questions back to specific campaigns without an elaborate string of questions, and too many questions will reduce registration rates – a bad idea.
- Activity-based measurements. Some marketers throw in the towel and say that their jobs end when the lead is handed off to the sales channel. This allows them to measure just their lead-generation activities – response rate, conversion rate to qualified lead, cost per lead, on time, on budget and so forth. When the other techniques are too expensive to justify, settling for activity measures makes a lot of sense.
Have you noticed there’s no silver bullet? If there were, we’d all be using it already. Each technique has its costs and benefits. Have fun selecting the right ones for your campaigns.