Do your marketing tactics leave you with too much year at the end of your money?

It happens. You invest in a year’s assortment of tactics (old media, new media, social, email, sponsorships, skywriting, fervent prayer, swag…) but knowing your return on investment is hard (foggy-night-wearing-sunglasses hard) to measure.
For example: if you could have known in February that tactic A was 5X more effective than tactic B, could you have shifted 10 months of effort to the better ROI? Not assume or guess. Know.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – but which baskets should be budgeted for how many eggs? Why double down on losers? Fortune favors the nimble.

The advanced analytics of Marketing Automation to the rescue. Today it’s possible to measure the ROI of every marketing tactic with a precision that was unimaginable a decade ago.

Measure not just media*

messaging**, too

market segments***

and the behavior of prospects****

*Which media choices are worth a continuing investment? You can map out which website visitors became customers, which display ads rang the cash register, how people who spent time on page 8 of your digital catalog performed, who passed your email along to colleagues. PDFs, friends, cannot do this. Sending them out with your content is the definition of spray and pray.

**Which messages are resonating with your audience? Your brand narrative can be a highly leveraged asset – provided you can separate benefit sheep from benefit goats. MA lets you do that: it’s a laboratory for message optimization and motivational research at the same time.

***You can gather priceless insight into the potential of segments in your pipeline. Do the appeal of your services and products vary by gender or region or age or ethnicity? Probably not by sign of the zodiac ;–) but are there opportunities unseen?

****User behavior can shorten long sales cycles. You can (should!) schedule workflows to send information to prospects based on tactics they’ve read or seen or spent time on. Complex or high-ticket sales require multiple touch points that propel the lead along the buyer’s journey. Today, MA can show you when to send the next message to continue a dialog, when to make an offer or issue an invitation, and when to go in for the coffee-is-for-closers kill.

Spray and pray marketing will drain your budget. It belongs in the marketing graveyard. “Half my advertising is wasted. If I only knew which half” was the Wanamaker complaint in the 19th century, and remained a legitimate concern through the 20th. In our millennium, not so much.

More than ever before, we have the tools to turn suspects into prospects into engaged leads into customers. The tactics are clear. Let’s do this.