Successful marketing always begins with a good understanding of customers and markets, as well as marketing metrics, established benchmarks for success.

All too often, organizations spend their time and energy planning and executing communications strategies without acknowledging the needs of their clients, their market’s trends or the efficacy of their efforts.

Technology has not only created more opportunities to communicate with your clients and prospects, it has brought better means to obtain marketing metrics and evaluate the effectiveness of these communications. Armed with this information, organizations can continuously monitor and communicate with their target audiences. This has led to a growing demand for programs that include:

• Marketing Metrics and Accountability. Are your marketing dollars producing the value necessary to meet your goals?
• Customer Understanding and Requirements. Are you aware of evolving customer needs and are you changing to meet them? Do you know why customers buy from you or not?
• Marketplace Knowledge. Have benchmarks and best practices been established within your industry? How does your organization measure up?

The objective of any marketing campaign is to send a message to your target audience and trigger a reaction—such as a thought, an emotion, or a behavior. Each organization must establish marketing metrics based upon its goals. Hospitals may look to patient visits, or levels of giving, educators may look at quantity and quality of student applications and businesses to sales and revenues. Unfortunately, drawing a line from a specific campaign or initiative to results—which often take months to appear—is too simplistic and fails to consider the plethora of other factors.

Clients recognize that research helps them understand their clients and markets, which will allow them to better spend their marketing dollars. While many agencies view research as a time and financial expense, more and more clients are demanding greater accountability for their dollars—and that’s where marketing metrics come into play.

Today, we can almost immediately track the effectiveness of e-mail campaigns, website visits, and other promotions available through the Internet. More intangible forms of communication such as branding strategy and identity, perception, win/loss, satisfaction, and defection can now be monitored much more efficiently—yielding results in shorter periods with greater validity, while being much more cost effective.

While many organizations attempt to collect this information from within, rarely are the results as accurate as they are from the outside. Clients and prospects tend to bias their answers or not respond at all, data is interpreted to meet the needs of the individuals, and often the critical data never makes it to those responsible.

Good data allows organizations to deploy their limited resources more effectively and fosters powerful brands and identities, accurate positioning, and market campaigns yielding better results.

© 2007 ADAMS