A guest blog by Steve Patti, a marketing strategy expert at Polarity, Inc. – part of The Permission Network
Most of you that have read our blog posts know that we’ve been trumpeting a wake up call to all marketers that the days of dumping millions of dollars into non-measurable, interruption marketing are over. While our target audience has been largely management and executives, we’re pleased to see the latest Ad Age article that raises the stakes and calls out the CMO as holding ultimate accountability for marketing performance and budget ROI — and we couldn’t agree more.
In today’s economic meltdown, marketers needs to be “manning the war room” where tactics are mapped, performance is measured, and funding decisions for tactics are made each week/month based on what is working and what is not. Not only are we talking about measuring acquisition performance of the various sales funnels, but focusing on the lifetime value of the customers produced in each sales funnel (see our other blog posts on this topic).
It doesn’t matter if you’re embarrassed to say you are a marketer not getting it right when it comes to performance metrics — because few are. However, the sooner you start the more quickly you can distance yourself from your competitors who may be sitting around their agency conference room asking how much “reach & frequency” they should be buying — instead of how they should be engaging prospective customers via permission marketing.
Feel free to share your thoughts.
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Why does it seem like results-based or permission-based marketing is such a new phenomenon? The funny thing is that after you explain how the process works, while everyone in the room agrees with the direction, their first reaction is to still go back to the old way of doing things. But they can’t help it. They want to be strategic and results-oriented, but automatically revert back to mindless tactics because it’s what they think works. No one is willing to sacrifice a little gain to do some experimenting and measurement, to eventually get a much larger gain that you would have doing it the “old way.”
The fact is that testing multiple offers simultaneously, particularly online, is easy and cost-effective. If you ran 4 different offers (all things considered equal) to see which one had the better response rate, sure, 2 of them are going to have dismal results at the expense of a few leads – but – you take the 1 or 2 best performers and run those while continuing to tweak performance as you go, and before long, you will have exceeded your results from last year under the non-results approach.
But results-based marketing is alive and well at Pear Analytics. Not only do we get you on the path to performance, we also provide the tools necessary to get there. Contact us to see how we can help.
