Marketing dashboards lead to more effective messaging across all channels. TML looks at the ‘four key elements to marketing success’

How do you know what is working and what isn’t? For most marketing professionals, the answer is a very 20th century mix of spreadsheets, intuition, and experience. The result is the old saying, “We know half of your advertising is working—we just don’t know which half.” A dashboard solution for the marketing department will enable you to control your messaging across all channels, measure the effectiveness of those messages, and then adapt your messaging to be more effective.

Marketing success is ultimately about driving the highest quality leads possible into the sales channel. The perfect message drives everyone who might be a buyer into your sales channel ready to buy—but prevents you from wasting time with people who won’t ever buy or who will be too costly to sell to.

There are four key elements to marketing success:

1. Understand Your Brand

The best marketing starts with the brand. Before you can develop a marketing message and get people excited about your products, you need to understand who you are. In the end, no software will help you understand who you are. The best you can expect from software is for it to help you understand who people think you are.

2. Control the Quality of Outbound Messaging

The outbound messaging is what you are saying to the world through your advertising and other marketing campaigns. Of course, a tremendous human effort drives your outbound messaging from a creative and brand management perspective. Software, however, can help you “tag” your outbound messages so your software will be intelligent about messaging, responses, and metrics.

3. Adapt Your Response Management

If you are lucky, your outbound messaging inspires everyone who hears it to pull out their checkbook and buy your products. For the rest of us, we need to determine what inspired them to respond, determine if they are worthy of our sales efforts, and craft a pitch that they are most likely to respond to. Your dashboard can become a traffic cop coordinating the responses to your outbound messaging.

4. Measure the Success

Can you quantify how effective your messaging was? In terms of responses? Conversions? ROI? Mind share? These are all critical metrics to revising your outbound messaging to be more effective both in terms of the number of people you draw in and the quality of the leads you are creating.

Software is limited in what it can do in terms of helping you understand your brand. It can provide you with an analysis of how the external world perceives your brand through tools like:

• Targeted web crawling and filtering
• Brand mapping
• Feed aggregation

In the end, however, understanding your brand is about understanding who you are—a very human pursuit.

The real impact of a dashboard

The real impact of a dashboard like the Simplicis™ Marketing Dashboard™ (http://www.valtira.com/marketingleaders) begins as you craft your outbound messaging. When thinking about the role of technology in outbound messaging, you should not make the mistake of thinking that your software should be limited to electronic channels. A good dashboard solution will support all outbound communications channels and integrate with your sales systems. In short, your software should be aware of the messages you are sending out and key metrics associated with those messages:

• What is the cost of sending the message?
• What are the salient characteristics (beyond simple demographics) of the target audience?
• What are the core elements of the message?
• What is the message’s “call to action”?

The Marketing Dashboard enables the control of outbound messaging through its campaigns module combined with digital asset management, lead management, and email marketing. The campaign module is the centerpiece that enables you to setup campaigns and associate the necessary characteristics with each campaign—regardless of whether you are using Simplicis or another tool for the other functions. Among its more advanced capabilities is support for “Web 2.0”-style tagging of your outbound messages.

In other words, you can arbitrarily associate characteristics to your outbound messaging. The LUSSO Collection (http://www.lussocollection.com) leverages these capabilities to manage their Google AdWords and Yahoo online ads beyond the click-through. The system knows exactly what respondents are doing after they click on the ad—and it tracks respondent interaction across multiple site visits. The ability to manage this interaction across time is very important for a business like LUSSO that sells a product with a long decision-making cycle.

Mass-market messages

Many of the messages we send are mass-market messages—even those we send over so-called “one-to-one marketing” channels. We want to drive respondents to a place where we can provide them with more personalized handling. Call centres have traditionally filled this role. We can give out a campaign-specific toll-free phone number and provide a low-cost professional with a script for responding to the outbound message behind the response. More often, however, companies are using their campaigns to drive respondents to their web site—a web site that nearly always has a “one size fits all” message.

Driving people to the web site

This is much more cost-effective and scalable than a call center solution—but the “one size fits all” messaging of the web site may not support your outbound messaging—or may even conflict with it. Integrating your web site with your integrated marketing software can make your web site “campaign aware” and enable it to respond with targeted messaging based on the characteristics of the campaign and the known characteristics of the respondent. On our web site, for example, we have a random case study rotation on the home page. If someone responds to a campaign aimed at a specific business vertical, however, the home page will instead serve an industry-specific case study. As a result, our web site subtly reinforces the outbound messaging that drew the person to the web site in the first place.

Virtual Radiologic leverages these features of Simplicis to deliver distinct messages to its two distinct audiences—hospitals and radiologists. When a radiologist responds to a print ad or a direct mail piece, they see different imagery than the hospital administrator who is looking at the exact same page. Simplicis accomplishes this level of personalization by enabling the people responsible for creating site content to arbitrarily tag the web site content. The Marketing Dashboard then matches content tags to campaign tags to determine what content will best impact the campaign respondent.

Abandon the call centre

Of course, you won’t abandon the call centre and you certainly won’t abandon your brick-and-mortal point-of-sales locations. A comprehensive marketing software solution therefore requires integration with each of your information systems that capture customer touch point information. It needs to pull information from those other systems and push all known information back out to them so you can respond at each touch point with the greatest possible understanding of the customer’s needs.

Know what is working and what isn’t

At the end of the day, you need to know what is working and what isn’t. Your marketing software can accomplish this by consolidating all of the data about your campaigns, responses, and other customer interactions into a single dashboard. The problem is, these analytics can often get over-complicated—so much so, that you end up with meaningless information overload. The best solutions keep things simple and enable you to drill down as necessary. For example, on a day-to-day basis there are likely just a few key metrics that you need to keep on top of. You need to be alerted when anomalies come up, and you need the ability to drill-down and slice-and-dice when specific events of interest pop up.

The role of software in marketing is not to make decisions for you; it is to provide you with exactly the right information you need for making decisions—in real time—and then empower you to act on those decisions. It becomes a dashboard and a control panel for the marketing function and you become the pilot managing the operation.

By George Reese, Valtira
Email: george.reese@valtira.com
Web: http://www.valtira.com