Last week I wrote about how to organize your data to allow actionable insights to emerge. This article will discuss some ways of organizing that data once it is collected. The goal is to demonstrate how to measure effectivness of marketing. Next week we’ll close out this mini-series with set of case studies on how this approach has been applied by other brands and marketing agencies.
Your goal once you have collected your “delivery” and “results” data is to organize that data in such a way as to make it actionable. (Note, this method also works well if you’re working with data that was originally collected for another purpose but is being re-purposed for a new need.)
Just organize the variables into the two groupings, “Delivery” and “Results.”
Nine times out of ten, your delivery data will be something you have control over. By “control” I mean those aspects of your business that you can change pretty much at will. When thinking about how to measure marketing results you need to keep in mind the things that define performance. Last week we gave four examples of delivery data:
- Staffing
- Packaging
- Marketing
- Price
As a business manager, you or someone in your company has control over these four items (and the hundreds more that define your business operations). For example, you can choose how heavily to staff the check-out counter, you decide the volume packaging segments, you know what type of TV buys or PPC online advertising you’ve bought, or when a discount is offered.
It would be fair to expect that each of these items will have some impact on your results measures. For example, you’d expect staffing price to impact sales volume.
Here’s the Market Research Consultants’ Trick
The trick is to test these relationships (using the right statistical methods) to see at what levels in a delivery variable are associated with a meaningful change in a results variable.
For example, let’s say you measure a 10% increase in sales volume when you dropped the price by 10% in January. In fact, you see roughly the same change in sales every time you drop the price by 10%. Moving forward, you could therefore increase sales by 10% anytime you wanted to… just drop the price by 10%. This finding is therefore “actionable.”
This is an obvious example. It’s common for sales volume to go up when price goes down. And for the most part, people don’t tend to consider the obvious as “insightful”. However, there does exist a multitude of this same type of example in your business that is not so obvious. These might include things such as:
- The relationship between packaging and seasonal sales fluctuation.
- The color of your “add to cart” button and how many people opt-out of the shopping cart.
- The placement of your 800# on a flier and the related call volume to your call center.
The goal is to hunt around your data to find these relationships. And then to deliver them to the people who need to know in a way that they can then make positive business decisions. This is the type of work we do at Portland Marketing Analytics every day.
Next week we’ll provide some case studies describing how other agencies and brands have used this process to make insights actionable.
Tags: How To Measure Effectivness Of Marketing, How To Measure Marketing Performance, Market Research Consultants
 |
Are You Open To Discussing A Different Approach To How You Measure The Impact And ROI Of Your Marketing? Every day I talk to business professionals who struggle with how to measure the impact of marketing and customer loyalty programs--specifically ROI projection challenges, measuring and reporting issues, or turning data into actionable insights. Call Now For a Free, 30-Minute Consultation 207.619.2297 | Learn More | Contact Options |