Teresa Caro
Caro Consulting
A company is listed at the top of the top search engines; its Webinar audience is abundant; and the ad campaign is award winning. Website traffic is up and phones are ringing. You would consider this a success story, right? Many felt this way in the late 90's, but when the dot-com bubble popped advertising dollars were the hardest hit by cutbacks. Why? Because, there was no direct connection between advertising dollars spent and sales generated.
Now the economy is starting to show signs of life—just look at the Dow for proof. It is time to learn from mistakes and look at advertising differently. This does not mean you should stop advertising on search engines, using Webinars, or seeking awards. Search engines and Webinars are great tools to reach people in the buy cycle. Awards are great ways to receive free, positive press. No, instead of discarding them or other forms of advertising, you need to put more thought into every single step.
Of course, each step can fill an entire newsletter—let's break it out into sections and start with Ad Tracking.
Ad Tracking
Whether you are in the business-to-consumer or business-to-business industry, all prospects are not created equal. In Discerning Distinctions in Buying Behavior, Janet Ryan explains, "Profitability comes from knowing who to focus your marketing message on, learning how to improve the buying experience of those you do attract, and increasing their propensity to complete the sale." To "know" this type of information, learn from it, and then act upon it, it is essential to have an effective and accurate ad tracking process.
More often than marketers like to admit, ad campaigns fail. Many don't have data and instead are quick to assign blame to the magazine or website, to the team that created the ad, or to the sales team receiving the leads. Yet, there are many components which exist in a single campaign. For example, if the call to action is to go to a website, the components would include:
- the ad placement,
- the ad creative,
- the landing page,
- the product or tool,
- interaction with the product or tool,
- and conversion to a sale.
Any one of these components, or others not listed, could be the root of a campaign's failings. And, much like the older Christmas lights you just put away, if one component (or light bulb) is faulty then the entire campaign (or strand of lights) does not work. To find the source of the problem you must replace one component at a time—an extremely tedious and time consuming task. By the time you have found the source of the problem months have gone by and your marketing budget has been depleted.
On the other hand, having the ability to track a prospect from awareness to consideration to purchase, tracking all of that back to the source, and then looking for trends, cuts the analysis time and expenses considerably. It also helps alleviate the risk of canceling a potentially profitable ad campaign.
Begin at the Beginning
Have you taken inventory of all your communications yet? Every company is different. Every company has special needs. You will need to identify what you need to track, how you plan to track it, where you plan to store the data, and how reports will be generated. The types of communications are going to dictate what you need for tracking and reporting tools. Online ads will need a tracking URL and then every step tagged. Offline ads to a call center will need a unique phone number or a promotion code. Ultimately, all the data will need to be collected and sent to the same repository for easy report generation.
Before you start the RFI/RFP process, walk down to the technology team—you never know what they already have in place for the website. Many website tracking software tools also have an ecommerce module. Next, chat with the sales department and evaluate their CRM system, there may already be tools in place that marketing can use.
Once the search is over, the technology is in place, and the data is flowing in, what do you do? Watch out for next month's issue when we talk about Lead Optimization.
Realizing it's difficult to find the time to take these steps? Send me an email and together we can evaluate and set up an ad tracking process for your company.
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