During the course of preparing a report on the success of an ongoing media campaign, I recently had cause to stop and reflect on the value of many of the marketing reports that are produced for and by businesses.
One of the challenges, especially within larger organisations, is that much of the information collected either remains locked in silos, so is rarely reviewed alongside datasets from elsewhere in the organisation, or focuses simply on short term requirements – column inches, web page impressions, site visitors, sales enquiries and so on.
Although all of these metrics – and more – are important for monitoring the performance of suppliers or individual marketing tools, they do not, in B2B circles at any rate, appear to be generally used as part of wider business analyses.
Take sales leads, for example. It’s established practice to define the success of campaigns in terms of the number of leads generated, for example from trade exhibitions. All well and good in so far as it goes, but shouldn’t the value analysis really look at the lifetime worth of each customer, combining data from multiple sources and departments to establish the real return from each activity or, better still, each set of integrated sales and marketing campaigns?
Taking a holistic view of each customer, or even groups of customers, helps to strengthen customer relationships through improved ongoing communication. It also allows cross selling techniques to be applied and enables the reasons for customer defections to be identified and remedied; all of which increase customer value and long term ROI still further.
What are we measuring? 
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