For many marketing managers, keeping on top of current thinking is relatively easy; the difficult bit is explaining what needs to be done to the MD. So this week I thought I’d cover five really basic points which still need making in 2013, not that they’ll be news to you, dear reader, but in the hope that my explanation might help when it comes to making the point to the boss.
3. We can now measure all of our marketing activity – and we need to.
With almost every prospect coming through the website, whether generated online or offline, we can measure and compare the effectiveness of promotional channels like never before. With the simple inclusion on the website of free services such as Google Analytics, not only can we see where our visitors have come from, but which were the “quality” ones too. By that I mean the visitors who’ve never been before, who are located in relevant parts of the world, and who spend time on the site, download documents or even fill in forms. These are often just a tiny fraction of the number of visits to a site.
The key to unlocking this analysis is to understand what visitor analytics applications can do, which requires training (or help, such as BMON provides to its Google AdWords management clients). It needs an understanding that headline statistics – like the number of visitors to a website – are relatively useless, and that every company needs to set up much more informative reports. This effort will be rewarded many times over in savings on identifiably wasted promotional activity.