Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

smesc2002,

That’s a really broad question. Generally speaking the most important metrics will tell you who raised their hands in a campaign (meaning responded and qualified themselves in some way) and who eventually bought the product or service.

My suggestion is to search KHE past questions on this topic, gather your thoughts, and restate your question with a more narrow focus that will get a higher number of responses from the KHEr’s.

Best of luck,

- Steve

Generally, for a company, the most important thing is to increase profits. Marketing does this through increasing what is called the "top line", or the money the get from selling products (as opposed to bottom line, which is their end profits, which is top line minus expenses). So most companies want to see how their marketing program affect sales as what they track.

But, tracking from marketing program to sales is not easy, nor reliable yet, so often companies settle for tracking leads (people who state they are interested in your product).

I think Praf was answering mostly for the Sales component of Marketing. There are similar ways to measure other components of the marketing mix.

The problem is that many of the measurement tools cost more than the value of the result. And if you measure all the sub-components, you'll be losing so much money that even if you're successful, you'll fail.

The real dilemma is that if you DON'T measure the components and simply look at the end result, you'll never know what's working and what's not, or how much better you could have done if you'd known the value of each component.

I'm a believer in using market research whenever an element is thought to be costly enough or important enough to make a difference between success and failure. I'm not talking about fuzzy stuff like focus groups. I'm talking about projectable, quantitative research among the target audience.

It's not easy to measure overall marketing effectiveness. It's really difficult. But if you break the task into manageable component parts, each can be measured, and that's the way I'd recommend you think about it.

smesc2002...

I totally agree with the earlier respons from Patti.

The most important things to measure are the things you set out to achieve in your marketing plan. That is where a lot of organisations go wrong, on NOT setting MEASURABLE objectives in their marketing plans - without those, any post-campaign measurement is meaningless.

So, if you set out to achieve increased turnover, measure turnover; if you set out to achieve increased awareness, measure awareness, and so on...

Good luck,
Bob