Is your Marketing Worth the Effort? The role of Measurement

Our customers are leaving and franchisees are complaining. What can we do quickly to make a difference?

Introducing the Seven Rules of No Excuses Marketing

Part 3

Our retail client was “between a rock and a hard place” — the customer base was declining and franchisees were up in arms. The business was subscription-based; after initial sign-up, customers could cancel at any time with a 30 day notice. The CEO was upset and our client needed action NOW.

Here are the six rules that we have covered so far:

1. Don’t complain about what you don’t have; use what you got.
2. Data only has to be accurate enough for the decision that needs to be made.
3. Make your spreadsheets work hard to make your project run fast.
4. Challenge conventional wisdom with data.
5. Work from the bottom up.
6. Market to internal customers to earn their “loyalty”

Click here to learn about Rules 1 and 2, click here to learn about Rules 3-5, and click here to learn about Rule 6.

No Excuses Marketing Rule #6: Market to internal customers to insure you earn their “loyalty”

Designing and executing a successful pilot marketing program is one step toward success. But if you do not take the next step, you will still wind up short of the goal line as time runs out. This often-overlooked step is critical to the success of a quick-to-market, high impact initiative, often making the difference between failure and success. Measurement answers the key questions: (1) what happened, (2) what was the result, and (3) what was it worth?. The difference between successful data-driven marketers and those who fail begins before the pilot program ever launches. It begins with a plan; a plan that includes how the program will be designed to be measured. And that measurement approach must be validated with key stakeholders, particularly finance, before the program ever launches, in effect, “beginning with the end in mind.” That is rthe approach our client took, and it paid off in spades.

The pilot program had been successful, and the results were communicated across the company. But the final potential roadblock had not yet been crosses; finance had not blessed the results. For many marketers, a visit to the finance department is similar to the visit to the dentist — no matter how things turn out in the end, it was going to be painful. But in this case, not the case at all.

We started by showing finance the approach document that they had supported before the program ever launched (just in case, we had an email confirming that our approach was valid ) As a result, the conversation immediately shifted from methodology to whether the data was valid (had there been collection or analysis issues). We showed them how we validated the results with key reports that were weekly published by finance, which seemed to address the issue. We then helped to gain credibility by recommending that we not bring forward the total result from the pilot (which was pretty dramatic) but a more conservative result that finance and marketing together believed would reflect the results in a real-world rollout.

Net of everything, finance approved the results and recommendation, all in 1 hour’s time! A first for all parties involved.

These seven rules are not the be-all and end-all of marketing; however, they do reflect learnings from almost two decades of data-driven marketing. In these days, when time and money are at a premium, none of us can avoid learning from Best Practices.

What other rules have you developed over the years? Let’s start a discussion and keep enhancing together!