Measure Your Marketing Efforts

Salesforce has some fantastic features for evaluating marketing performance.  But why should we measure marketing?  Before I started using Salesforce, I had very little insight into the success or failure of marketing efforts.  Yet, my company was spending a lot of money on marketing.  It was much easier to measure sales performance, but we really needed some insight into marketing ROI.

But with most CRMs, the results of any and all marketing campaigns can be captured and analyzed at nearly every step of the process.  The knowledge then directly feeds into ongoing improvement of those marketing programs. 

One of the biggest surprises, when we began tracking and collecting data on marketing campaigns, was how some ides that we all thought were fantastic didn’t actually prove to be so when looking at the data.  Further, those campaigns that we thought were a bit dry and uncreative and that we almost didn’t move forward with turned out to be the most effective.  The bottom line here is that when marketing key performance indicators, and other specific metrics, are tied and tracked to marketing campaigns, you can begin to understand the real impact of marketing costs, and the real sources of your business.  Those sources are not always what you imagine them to be.

My advice for you marketers out there is to learn the how to use the tools and features of your CRMs to track your campaigns.  Doing so will create a culture of continuous analysis and improvement in your marketing departments and marketing efforts.  Start small, but make it a goal to measure all aspects of your marketing organization.  And perhaps most importantly, be sure to take action based on those measurements.  Data is only as valuable as it used.

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