Measuring marketing performance management for business purpose

1. Measuring marketing performance management for business purpose Marketing performance management is one complex topic. Marketing is responsible for the business function of getting, maintaining and growing customers. This involves making marketing strategy decisions, and developing the appropriate marketing mix. It involves managing product categories and market segments, methods of distribution, and processes of sale. Marketing performance management is critical to your business success and to maximizing sales revenues and profits. Despite the importance of efficient marketing performance management, marketing department accountability and marketing efforts are minimal in many enterprises. Many companies are wasting a lot of money on the marketing. Marketing performance management is difficult because companies generally do not adequately track marketing results and are therefore unable to develop relevant marketing or "metrics" measures. Marketing performance management is much easier if you boil marketing down to its three basic goals; attracting potential customers (lead generation), turning leads into actual customers (lead conversion) and retaining repeatedly purchasing customers (customer retention). All marketing activities are geared to one of these goals. It's tricky to develop meaningful measures because there are three variables in the process. However, having only three variables means that if you develop marketing metrics relating to each of the variables you can manage marketing performance. Managing marketing routine is then a question of testing various approaches by changing only one of the variables at any time. Marketing performance supervision is basically a process of testing different methods and discovering which ones work best. You'll learn something if you change just one variable with each test. If you change more than one variable, you won't know which change has caused the results to improve or deteriorate.

2. Lead Generation Lead generation is the process you are attracting potential customers through. The source of each lead must be accurately captured and recorded to measure the effectiveness of your lead generation. When someone comes to your store, for example, or calls on the phone, you would like to ask why they came to you. The answer will be from a specific ad, or a friend's recommendation, or just going past and seeing your sign, or a number of things. You need to record and analyze this information frequently, track your advertising response rates and see what's most influential on your market. You need to make recording this information easy or your sales people won't accurately record it. Automate the process in a way, or make it a part of your sales routine if possible. For instance, make sure that you always provide quotes generated by the computer that have a field for the source of the inquiry that needs completion. Marketing attribution analysis of this information will allow you to identify your results in different areas such as product offerings, styles of communication, advertising media, etc. The purpose of all this recording and analysis is to identify which ads are profitable and which aren't, so that you can make smarter advertising decisions. You will then also be able to identify your average cost of each ad source per lead. Lead conversion Lead conversion is influenced by your sales methods, pricing strategies, warranties and guarantees, financing options and credit policies, etc. Each of these variables may be tested to determine optimal levels at different points. The two common metrics to measure in this area are the conversion rate, or number of sales compared to enquiries and the average sale value. You may also want to break these measures down to analyze results from various product categories and market segments. Measuring your conversion rate and average sales value will help you focus on developing strategies to boost Marketing performance management. Most of the effort to try to increase sales is usually aimed at increasing the number of enquiries. However, if you are aware of your conversion rate and average sales value, you will often see that improving your conversion rate will be much more effective in increasing sales, meaning no additional marketing cost is required.