4CM

There’s a real mixed bag of economic data appearing these days! Retail sales in January were at their worst for 15 years, yet revised figures just released by the Office for National Statistics show that manufacturing output grew by 0.9% in December. Similarly, the industrial production measure, which includes mining and energy, rose by 0.5%; to put that in perspective, industrial production accounts for around 17% of the UK economy.

At the same time, after growth of 0.1% in the UK economy during the last quarter of 2009, and gloomy talk of a double-dip recession, we’ve had the Bank of England’s quarterly Inflation Report predicting growth of 3.2% by the last quarter of 2011 – so that’s something to look forward to!

The bottom line is that although nobody really knows what’s likely to happen in the coming months, the consensus is that there is likely to be a slow (although not necessarily steady) return to growth in 2010/11.

At 4CM we’re already seeing signs of optimism, as clients start to remove the budget constraints that have been in place since early last year. As a result, we’re now working on longer term marketing and media campaigns that will strongly position our clients and enable them to capitalise on their target markets as growth returns to the economy.

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.