Growing revenue and customers may be the “standard” marketing goals of almost every business at a high level, but your business will have your own unique interpretation of these goals and objectives that are specific to your business and how you operate. Monitoring and measuring your marketing results is essential if you want to achieve your goals. How else will you know what to do more of, what to change, and what to stop doing altogether?
The easiest way to measuring and monitor the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is to establish a quick reporting tool, otherwise known as a marketing dashboard. A marketing dashboard will allow you to quickly and effectively evaluate your marketing performance and identify necessary changes.
There are four basic steps to building your marketing dashboard.
BIG Goals
The first step is to identify the big important goals (BIG Goals) you are driving toward. This list should be a short, maybe just two or three goals that support your overall business strategy. Examples might be adding 100 new customers, increased sales of your most profitable product of service, or achieving a significant overall revenue target.
Strategies
Next, for each of the goals identified in the first step, you should identify the strategies that need to be taken in order to achieve that goal. For example, if the goal is to obtain 100 new customers you might have strategies that include; lead generation, referrals, and public relations. Each of you strategies must be something that can be measured.
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” — Winston Churchill
Tactics
The third step is to identify the set of tactics that will be used for each of the strategies identified in the second step. Again, this should be a limited list, probably one to three tactics for each strategy. Building on the referral example above, you might have tactics that include; contacting existing customers with a referral oriented offer for their friends and family, enhancing your new customer experience with an emphasis on a WOW experience, and discussing referrals earlier in the sales process rather than the end. Each of these should be measureable, for example your goal may be to mention referrals at the beginning of the purchase process for 100% of your prospect or new clients.
Reporting
The last step in the building of your dashboard is to collect, store, and report your dashboard information. Your dashboard may be a technologically blend of tools and techniques or may be a dedicated cloud-based dashboard product. Most business begins with a simple solution, i.e. Excel spreadsheet and charts, at first and then move to more complex and automated tools once they determine their needs and processes. The emphasis should not be on the elegance or sophistication of the tool(s) but rather on the opportunities to make your marketing results better. Establishing a marketing dashboard does not have to be overly complicated. With a straightforward approach and some serious thinking your business can monitoring and measure marketing performance which is the first step in getting to the results that you really want for your business.
Want to know more about selecting the right mix of strategies and tactics that will work for your business? Start getting better marketing results. Take The First Step With A Signature Brand Marketing Audit..
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