6. TRACKING

Effective marketing depends on appropriate tracking, with such buzzwords as:

Market Trends and Business Intelligence
Customer Performance Management
Web Analytics & Useability Optimisation
Direct Marketing Metrics

There's a lot of ways to slice it.

Here's how I am looking at it right now, as levels from broad blue skies of Business Intellgience, to pin-point focussed metrics on Prospect Intelligence:

Business Intelligence
Marketing Intelligence
Customer Intelligence
Prospect Intelligence

These corespond to aspects of the Marketing Matrix.

Business Intelligence

Here you are tracking corporate strategic KPIs and market trends. Tools such as Siebel, and Business Objects. Used for tracking performance metrics across Strategic Business Units.

Marketing Intelligence

Within a particular Strategy Business Units remit, here you review Market Research and competitor positioning for each product area. Your Marketing Intelligence will evolve from your Market Research.

Back-End (Customer > Retention) Intelligence

Now at the level of campaign management for customer acquisitions and retention programs, including soft measurement and hard measurements. See the Marketing ROI page and Customer Performance Management page.

To identify the value of your expenditures, stick to this simple rule: If you cannot measure it, do not do it.

Front-End (Prospect > Acquisition) Intelligence

Here we are foussed on the metrics of lead generation campaigns such as traffic generation through SEO, SEM, Social Media, offline advertising, etc.

At the most basic, adding Google Analytics to your websites will deliver insightful information about your visitors and where they are coming from.

360 View

Those 4 areas each tie very closely with the one adjacent. Each higher level should subsume the metrics of the lower level through a more integrated reporting tool.

As marketers, we hope for that day, and see its mirage ever approaching.

Testing and Reporting

Tracking of Marketing Campaigns ultimately lead to a handful of numeric measurements.

For a marketing manager these are known as your KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. These few numbers provide an overall at-a-glance view of the effectiveness, growth, and 'health' of your marketing campaigns.

The Aggressive Marketer seeks to have under-the-thumb control of those KPIs through a series of Tracking Reports that track and measure the progress of each and every marketing campaign, source of revenue, and influence on the bottom line that exists for the business.

Your KPI's must be measured with vigor to validate any and all marketing campaigns you run.

LTCV: Lifetime customer value… What is the long-term average dollar value of my customer?

Tracking can be time consuming, but very helpful in helping to direct marketing spend.

Testing Landing Pages and Sales Pages

Google provides a multi-variate split testing service called Web Optimizer. I use a private label program which goes beyond Web Optimizer as shown in the diagram of one of my old tests that ended up producing a 37.84% conversion rate.