Evaluation is Key to Show Value of Marketing - Violet Bedelis
What marketing professionals need to ask themselves when weighing up the costs of evaluation is: How can the marketing team determine success or failure without evaluation? How does the team sell the idea of re-running a campaign or project if there is no supporting evidence of ROI? And finally, how does a Marketing Manager ensure their marketing budget is not continually reduced year on year due to the perceived lack of value by the executives?
Just as the setting of goals and objectives are key to the success of any project, so to is the evaluation criteria. Evaluation needs to be established at the beginning of the project.
Each project plan or briefing document developed by marketing should always contain a section dedicated to evaluation. It is important that time is spent at the early stages of a project determining what the key objectives are and how they are going to be measured this is essential to determining the success of the project. Admittedly some marketing projects are easier to measure than others. Nonetheless there should always be a quantifiable measure for each project. For example, a marketing flyer campaign with the purpose of attracting new clients could have a goal of 10% of leads converted to sales. The evaluation could be tracked by using a dedicated phone number on the flyer to accurately reflect the number of leads and sales generated by the campaign.
A lead generation campaign such as this is easy to measure, as you can link the calls placed to the phone number back to the level of sales generated by the campaign.
Exhibitions and trade shows have the main objective of creating brand awareness and generating leads. The evaluation of lead generation is straightforward as you can measure success using the evaluation techniques in the previous example. Brand awareness, however, is a little more difficult to evaluate but can be achieved at a small cost. When people think of brand awareness evaluation, they think surveys and focus groups which, admittedly, can be expensive and time consuming. However, an affordable way of determining brand awareness (although not as extensive and accurate as focus groups and surveys) is to incorporate brand-related questions on your regular marketing material such as competition entry forms have you heard of ADP previously if so how? Do these on a regular basis and track the responses.
When promoting specific products and services via mediums such as advertising, DM and web campaigns it is important to establish evaluation from the very beginning. This makes it easier and cheaper to evaluate at the end of the campaign. By setting up specific web addresses, free call numbers, dedicated call to respond numbers, and document codes on promotional material in the development stages you can easily track the success of your campaign.
In order to create a sense of value for the marketing function it is important that all projects are evaluated and reported on. Make the projects and outcomes visible and you will soon create a greater awareness of the value of marketing to your organisation.
Violet Bedelis is the Marketing Director at ADP Employer Services acccounting service
ADP business services franchise is the worlds largest provider of payroll and HR solutions for SME's. The product - 'Payline' services organizations ranging from 4 - 150 Employees. Services include; payment of employees, payment of PAYG Withholding Tax, payslips, payment summaries etc 03.08.2008
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