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February 13, 2006: ROI: Act now before your competitors do

How can you turn a “I wonder how that campaign did…”  into a “I know what that campaign did”? How can you confidently approach your senior management with additional marketing funding requests based on solid results? What steps can you take today to start quantifying exactly what your marketing programs are doing? The experts say, “Stop talking and just start doing something about ROI.” Here are three easy lessons from an industry to do just that.

February 06, 2006: Don’t be happy, worry!

Have you met a really happy marketing executive lately?

The ones I have met with are all running hard and fast. They are stressed. Worried. They are under fire from all sides to prove their worth and to justify the value of their marketing spends, staffs and budgets.

They also are trying to put some definition around just what they should be measuring, and defining key performance indicators (KPI’s) and metrics that they’ll be held accountable for. To that end, they have their work cut out for them.

January 29, 2006: Time to thaw our chilly reception of ROI?

ROI, ROI, ROI…if you happen to work in marketing and by now have not heard “ROI,” you’re probably still dialing up to the Web using a 14k modem on a party-line and are awaiting the 14,500,000 Google search results on “marketing ROI” to load in your browser.

Let’s face it: marketing ROI is hot, and rightly so, as accountability is being driving down throughout companies, and Chief Marketing Officers and their staffs are being held to financial standards on their marketing spends like never before.

Even so, free-wheeling marketing types are being thrust into the uncharted waters of marketing metrics and measures, and I would venture a few guesses as to why marketeers may be giving a chilly reception to ROI, and why they are reluctant to cheerfully adopt it in all they do.

January 23, 2006: Power to the numbers people!

Ah, marketing. The last creative bastion of making fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, intuitive, gut-level “decisions” (okay, hunches) for ways to sell more stuff to more people while tossing caution and budgets to the wind. Things have changed, and marketers, like it or not, have now met their match in math—or perhaps they’ve found new friends in finance?

January 15, 2006: ROI Silver Bullet: Fact or Fiction?

What’s holding back marketing managers from comprehensively measuring their Marketing spends and ROI?  Is it process? Technology? Mindset?  People?

Pat LaPointe, writing for CMO Magazine, suggests another possible reason: The Measurement Demon.

One such demon is called “The Silver Bullet Hunter.” This is a person, perhaps lurking in your very department, who “seeks the simplistic, single index to explain all aspects of marketing effectiveness,” says LaPointe, referring to that person’s search for a single “holy grail of measurement,” ignoring anything else as being “too complex.”

Think of it. What harried “feet-being-held-to-the-fire” Chief Marketing Officer wouldn’t pay a fortune to have the ROI Silver Bullet to show off to the CFO? “Hey, look at this: 300% ROI! I want a raise!”

August 21, 2005: ROI: Bottom-line it for me

I remember when ROI was “easy.” Finish your project on deadline, come in under budget, win an award, and if the company president liked it (or his photo), then you had great “ROI.”  Well, the times have changed and now you’re wondering how to really prove ROI, let alone even define it. And the scary part is, we as marketing types better figure out the ROI deal, because when there is a downturn in business, what tends to get scrutinized first? The marketing budget. Why? No quantifiable ROI, at least in the eyes of the finance department.

June 10, 2005: Rocky Mountain ROI, RSS and Blogs

Quick: can you define blogs and RSS? If you bumped into your CEO in the elevator and he or she asked pointedly, “So tell me all you know about RSS and these blog things,” could you fire off your best virtual elevator speech faster than the express car racing to the top floor of your office building?

Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what they are, because a lot of us in marketing don’t know either.