From the course: Marketing Communications

Create a measurement plan

From the course: Marketing Communications

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Create a measurement plan

- In an ideal world, every dollar spent needs to be tracked. If you do this, then you're thinking like the chief financial officer of your company. Not every company has deep pockets, which makes it even more important to set up a good measurement plan to track your marketing efforts. How do you know your TV and radio advertising is working, or if you're paying for promotions and sponsorships online, are they converting to qualified leads through your website? These are all important questions that must be answered. Every single answer starts with the same response. First, knowing what you're trying to achieve from your marketing campaign and then making sure you're able to track the metrics in a measurement plan, one that shows you're getting a return on your investment, or ROI. Return on investment is a financial calculation. Now it's time to create a measurement plan. Let's break down the components. Because we know the marketing function aligns with the business goals of the organization, let's focus on the goal of creating brand awareness and increase leads and sales for an organization. Here are the steps to create a measurement plan to capture how your marketing programs are indeed effective and driving your business. Number one, set your objectives. What is it that you're trying to achieve? Do you want to establish more brand familiarity and awareness? Is it increase sales from existing customers? Do you want to acquire new customers or build customer loyalty? Ask yourself, how much of X are you trying to achieve and by when? Number two, set your key performance indicators, or KPIs. Your measurement plan has to show how your strategies and tactics are helping you to reach specific benchmarks. For example, if you're trying to acquire new customers, then your KPIs would include increases in website traffic quarter over quarter as a result of your advertising or online promotions. If your goal and objective was to establish brand awareness or familiarity, then your KPI may be an increase in the number of searches for your brand. Number three, determine the type of metric or measurement to track. Let's just stick with brand awareness for a moment. Not all KPIs are tied directly to a purchase on your website. However, the measurement may be the percentage increase of branded traffic from various advertising sources, or the increase in your social media following. The KPIs you measure in your plan will help you to see if you're headed towards success. It's really important to select the right KPIs and metrics and to limit the number based on the resources you have. Number four, use marketing segmentation to track different customer targets. You have to make sure your measurement plan and the data you collect represents important segments of the market. Marketing segmentation divides your customers into subgroups who have different wants and needs. The data you're collecting has to be tied to your different segments to better understand what empowers them. Segmentation offers insights into their actions based on demographic or geographic location. Segmenting helps you establish a baseline assessment that provides context for each segment and establishes trends for each. Number five, evaluate your plan, gain insights and keep it updated. Because your measurement demonstrates that marketing is connected to your business strategies and impacting your bottom line, it's critical to keep your plan updated. Capturing the data and reporting the information in a timely fashion keeps the team abreast of what's working and where you're not hitting your targets. When you have a good measurement plan, you're not only proving that marketing helps the business but you're also improving upon your marketing efforts to make better business decisions as a result. Now ask yourself, what does your measurement plan look like? Do you know exactly what you want to achieve and how your marketing campaign is supporting your business? A good measurement plan will set you off in the right direction and keep you poised for success. If you're able to incorporate these five key components then it may be easier to find the ROI with a plan that details marketing and business value every step of the way.

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