I was just reading a post by Mac McConnell, You’ve Got Marketing Automation. Now What?, and one of the points Mac made really resonated with me. He was talking about what could be referred to as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
One of the things that marketers must get better at is the ability to measure the effectiveness of every element of their marketing mix. In the scenario that Mac shared, his client had stopped doing tradeshows because they didn’t think they were as effective as other tactics.
According to Adobe’s 2010 Analytics Survey, 44% of 1,000 marketers surveyed said they could not allocate sales and costs to marketing campaigns. Given this, it’s not really surprising that 76% of marketers cannot measure full marketing ROI.
Which is why many marketers are still playing the intuition game.
So, back to Mac’s story. What his client did once they had marketing automation to track lead disposition was to divide their spend equally across 3 demand generation initiatives:
- list rental
- content syndication
- one trade show
Guess which one is driving 2.3X more pipeline than the others after 6 months of tracking and measuring activity and results?
Yes, that would be the trade show the company had eliminated from their marketing plan because they thought the event wasn’t successful.
There are a lot of new marketing technologies, processes and tactics available [read shiny new toys]. But this doesn’t mean that the more traditional tactics aren’t effective – well at least some of the time. The important thing is to gain insights to deeper data that can prove how close your intuition is to the truth.
Mac’s post also provided a great chart showing the difference between engagement with content that prospects find valuable and that ridiculous “look at me” content that many companies are still cranking out.
The difference is striking – click over to Mac’s post and see it for yourself.
Although I have to say that the customer story statistic surprised me. The questions I’d have for Mac would be during which stage of the buying process was the customer story used? And, was it a valuable story that showcased the problem-to-solution process or a glorified 2-page brochure that touted brand and product names without any meat on its bones?
