With all the changes in the marketplace, how do you know what to do? What will be effective? What worked for the past several years might not be as effective as it used to be.
Do you have a plan for constantly testing new marketing techniques? And if you are constantly testing, do you consistently track your results?
Marketing without measurement is wasting ROI. If you aren’t sure what is working, how can you do more of what does work and less of what doesn’t?
The CMO of Best Buy was recently interviewed in Fortune magazine. Here’s what Michael Linton says that works for Best Buy:
I’ll tell you what has worked for us. We have two streams of marketing. One is “ready, aim, fire,” which is marketing we know - the circular [in the Sunday newspapers], some TV, a lot of direct marketing. The other is “ready, fire, aim.” That is, things we don’t know but we believe we have to at least try so we stay current and fresh and new in the marketplace. If you hold the new tools to the same standard as the old tools, you actually won’t do many new things, because you can’t measure a lot of them. If you want to stay on the cutting edge, you have to invest some time, money, and personal risk in developing and implementing those new tools.
Even though he says you can’t measure a lot of the new types of marketing, I think you have to come up with new ways to measure. Search engine rankings. Surveys of recent purchasers that used the new tool. We’ve got to come up with ways to measure marketings ROI. Your thoughts?