The president and executives of your company are holding you and your marketing department accountable. They want to see the total dollar amount of sales generated by your marketing efforts exceed the costs of those marketing efforts. In effect, they want to make sure your department is not costing them money.
That presents a problem for you. You and those in your department are creative people. None of you are analytical or financial types. How do you do this? How do you give the information to your president and the executives they want?
Over the last several years, you have heard about these various analytical tools you can use. You have learned you can find out how many visitors look at your website every day. You can also see how much time they spent doing that. You can also see what pages they looked at on your website and the amount of time they spent on each one.
You can get the same information on any Content Marketing campaign you run. You can track every blog post, email, white paper and case study in the same way.
When Your President Wants to Know How the Marketing Department is Doing, He Wants to Know It’s Making the Company Money
You meet with your president to review your marketing efforts. He asks you to show him the results of your efforts. He wants to know how many sales the company made because of your marketing efforts.
In response, you tell him these were three pieces in your marketing campaign. 50 people viewed this one. 75 people viewed that one. 100 people viewed the third one. The people spent 40 seconds viewing the first one, 60 seconds viewing the second and 90 seconds viewing the third.
Don’t Have That Deer in The
Headlight Look When He Asks You
He says that’s great. How many sales came from that and what was the dollar amount of those sales? He sees the deer in the headlight look on your face. You have no answer for him. You don’t know.
The meeting ends. Your president is very concerned. He doesn’t know whether your marketing efforts are helping or hurting the company. His trust in you disappears.
The analytical data that has developed is great. There is one big problem. That data is difficult to understand. It is difficult to determine which pieces are working. Most of it doesn’t tell you which prospects became interested in the product or service your company offers. It doesn’t tell you how many of those eventually purchased as a result of your marketing.
Get Back to Basics
Provide the Information as Simply as Possible
It’s time to get back to basics. It’s time to provide your president and the executives of your company the information they want as simply as possible. Here is all they really want at any given time:
- How many new sales your marketing generated for the company and the dollar amount of those sales.
- How many more sales the company will see on an ongoing basis in the future.
How do you deliver this? By creating the marketing funnel outlined in previous posts.
They will find out from your CFO and the accounting department how much your marketing department is costing the company. They Accounting department will also furnish the cost of each marketing campaign.
4 Easy to Track Points
Your job is to track the results of your marketing efforts in the simplest and most basic categories. I have outlined these in recent posts. Here they are again:
- Prospects – All of those people who have told you they might be interested in what you offer.
- Leads – Those prospects who have raised their hands and indicate they want to know more about a specific product or service you offer. You also tell them a little about your company
- Great Leads – Those who indicate they want more detailed information. You furnish them white papers which contain more detailed information about the product or service they’re interested in. You also furnish them information about your company and why you’re the best company to provide this product or service to them.
- Ready to Buy – Those leads who still want more and are ready to be turned over to your sales department for follow-up and a sale buy one of your sales reps.
Ask your sales department to advise you on a monthly basis of every sale made to each lead you turned over to them and the dollar amount of the sale.
4 easy to track points which let you and the executives in your company know exactly what your department is doing.
Once you set this up all you have to do is to show the total number into each group and track them as frequently as you desire (monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually).
It’s best for you and your marketing department to track this monthly. The president and executives would probably want to see this less frequently.
Easy to Understand Reports
Your report can be as simple as this:
Most Recent Marketing Campaign
You may have several different Content Marketing campaigns running at the same time. The first may have started quite a long time ago while the newest started very recently. How do you track these?
You track every campaign separately and combine the results from all of them into one master overview. Below is the easiest way to do this.
Just remember – All your president and the executives of your company are looking for is this – Is our Marketing Department an asset to our company or is it just draining money from us? The simplest way to give them the info they need to make this determination is the best.
