Reflection on Marketing Effectiveness

As have been working on the market processes in my business lately and I have found the information presented below useful. I thought I should share it.

1. Thinking that ROMI (return on marketing investment) measurement is the goal Measurement is not the goal, it is a tool for managing the overall process and, more importantly, driving continuous performance improvement.
2. Treating marketing accountability as a tech/tool project - It's fine for your IT department to house the data, but they shouldn't own the data.
3. Believing your organisation is ready to be accountable - Marketing accountability needs organisational readiness; take an internal audit to see what skills, processes, tools and data exist, then see where the needs are.
4. Believing better visibility requires more reports - Don't just report data, build a company-wide analytics framework.
5. The more precise the measures, the better the decisions Information is there to inform decisions, not lead them.
6. Treating marketing effectiveness as a marketing function - Marketing effectiveness is not a marketing issue, it's a company issue.
7. Dropping analytics and tools on the desktop - New metrics and processes need to be phased in so that change can take root.
8. Leaving the data until last - Keep marketing analytics in mind early in the process, so that as your information architecture is designed from the ground up, you know what data you need to capture -- and why -- so that you can make meaningful analyses.
9. Taking the "do it yourself" approach - It can be done, but you better have expertise in seven major competencies: project management, business metrics design, organization and process design, data and database design, marketing analytics, systems integration and change management.

According to my research (so to be published here), avoiding these pitfalls can lead to a 15 percent improvement in ROI in just the first year of implementation alone.

Also I thought it might be useful to highlight the key points for Word of Mouth campaigns:

1. Finding the right people to talk about you (influencers and evangelists)
2. Giving them something to talk about (viral email, samples, buzz and more) - not the important link to email marketing here!
3. Creating tools to make it easier for them to talk to each other (blogs, discussions, tell-a-friend forms)
4. Participating in the conversation
5. Tracking and measuring results

I hope this is useful?

Cheers

OD Doctor