A plethora of advice exists about how to maximize
your marketing ROI, so it might be helpful to review a few ideas, based solely on my own experience with planning and designing marketing campaigns. These are real world lessons that I wish I knew before embarking on
each of the several marketing exercise in the past.
- Allow for creative testing for all your campaigns. There is no one-size-fits-all anymore, and we need to understand that testing and campaign messaging needs time. Make sure to plan for time and budgets to accommodate these variables. Outline what products you want to focus on, what customer base you want to target, what are their buying behaviors, what are the industry changes influencing those behaviors, resources that you will need to gather and analyze data, etc.
- Understand uniqueness in your customer base. All customers are not alike and all don’t see your products the way you do. Run surveys, understand customer demographics, decipher their purchase tendencies from research or past campaign results, segment the customers based on their product liking, relevance and ability to purchase, identify product categories to target to specific segments, etc. You get the idea – segment the customers based on their propensity and ability to buy and ROI of your campaigns will automatically get better.
- Define your product categories and seasonality. There are different product features that appeal to different customer segments. In addition, there is seasonality of when customers tend to purchase products and how much do they spend on it. Make sure to account for this analysis in your planning cycle to ensure that these products and customer segments are adequately aligned. You may even get a head start on this analysis by looking at any current data that you may have gathered from previous campaigns. However, don’t forget to take into account any new products and customer segments that may be called for as you go through the year.
- Plan simultaneous campaigns through your marketing channels. Establishing multiple simultaneous touch-points with your customers usually results in greater exposure and better conversion, if product adoption is the primary goal. Here I am referring to a multi-channel approach through DM, email, social media and other avenues of reaching your customers. This will require a well thought out marketing plan, with an emphasis on consistent messaging, product positioning, seasonality and customer segmentation (refer my post on the topic here). Expect to see 5% to 15% better results, as I saw in my tests.
- Monitor customer quality from the promotions. Goes without saying, yet we don’t allow for quality monitoring in our planning. Customers acquired through the due diligence as discussed above are likely to be highly valuable. However, plan your processes and resources to allow for adequate data gathering, analysis and monitoring of customer quality. Are the customers loyal to product, brand, offer, other? Define metrics to measure customer engagement with your product and brand, which will be a good indicator of the success of your campaigns and drive up your ROI.
- Invest in marketing infrastructure and talent. Most organizations stumble on this one. We may believe we have all it takes, but without the right process and infrastructure to support your marketing efforts, none of the tricks discussed thus far in this series are going to be effective. We marketers need data gathering and processing capabilities to collate results from tests, campaigns, etc., to define and implement our next steps. Most organizations are ill-equipped to handle multi-channel data and lack the talent to make sense out of it. Invest now or plan for it, so you are building up to this capability and preparing yourself for success in the years to come.
- Always question “what worked last time” theories. This could be a tricky one. In some cases past performance may be an indicator of future success, but given the variability in our products and customers, we ought to continuously test and re-learn. The tricks above are geared towards better targeting and segmentation, which renders each effort rather unique and requires careful reporting such that we define campaigns and success based on relevant parameters. The take-away is that, don’t take a short cut and compromise on research-and-learn simply because we may have results from the past tests/campaigns and we could save time/money on the next one. Build your plans and budgets now to allow for the continuous learning cycle – your marketing ROI depends on it, so should you.
Hope the above helps in a better marketing management and calendar that suits the "continuous learning" in our highly competitive marketplaces.
