Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

Dear Jason,

The first things you need to figure out are:

1. Who you're targeting,
2. What you want to say,
3. Why they ought to listen to you,
4. What you want them to do next.

What will you say to people in your campaigns that will make
them stop what they're doing, listen to you, and take action?

With your overall mission to link heart disease and gum disease, you'll find your material is far easier to track if you know what you're measuring. Sounds obvious I know but it's a point that's often overlooked.

It's not possible to measure what you can't track and you can't track what you don't break down into segments by: ZIP code,
age, gender, stress levels, and conditions related to health, diet, physical condition, education levels, income levels, and so on.

If both you and your audience are based in the USA you can
find a great deal of this kind of socioeconomic information here: https://www.city-data.com/

The more specific you can be in terms of the connection between your message and your recipient, and the more tightly focused your narrative is to that recipient's lifestyle, the more alignment you'll create.

When you create alignment you create rapport and when you create rapport you connect with people. No one's going to listen to you (thereby leaving you nothing to measure) if you can't connect with them in some meaningful way.

This means talking to your recipient as if you were talking to him or her one-on-one. Once you know who you're talking to and what you want to say, you then need to figure out how you'll measure the effectiveness of your marketing.

Is your plan to simply raise awareness; to sign up a certain number of people to do something; to attract a certain number of people to an event

You then need to set up key performance indicators for each
piece of each campaign (and yes, that's a set of action points for EACH e-mail; for EACH letter; for EACH postcard—indeed, for EVERYTHING!).

Every piece of marketing must include a powerful and compelling call to action—something the recipient must DO in order to receive more information, or to qualify for entry into a prize draw, or to stand a chance of winning something or of qualifying for something of higher perceived value than the action they're being asked to carry out.

Here, the payoff for the recipient MUST have a higher perceived value, but in order to GET that thing, they must carry out an action and it's the action you'll measure.

In my experience, too few marketing people in non-profits either can do this or can be bothered to do this which is a HUGE mistake.

Will you measure success by traffic to various URLs? Or calls to various 800 numbers (and in each case, use a different URL or 800 number PER action). This way you can split test headlines, copy, images, photo captions, prize offers and so on and so forth.

At the end of each campaign you'll then wind up with a data set that NO ONE can argue with: that for this action, 65.34 percent of retired men between the ages of 65 and 85 with income of X dollars per year responded positively. And so on.

To pull in all this date you might need to be more specific with your notions of "adverts and e-shots". Just because you want to USE these methods of deliver does NOT guarantee their effectiveness in being able to DELIVER, either your message, OR the information you're looking to track. So, ask dentists and their ilk to see what kind of information they have on the publications and delivery vehicles your intended audience uses and responds to.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
The Direct Response Marketing Guy™
Wilmington, DE, USA