Without evaluation, every marketing initiative and program is important…to the person who created it. Each business unit’s baby is smart, beautiful, and precious – regardless of what seasoned marketers know on what has worked and failed. It is misplaced passion.

A metric-free environment puts a marketing team at a disadvantage; marketers become soulless order takers and not pioneers conquering new lands.

Campaigns with clear goals, calls to action, and tracking remove ambiguity, waste, and order-taking in marketing. These campaigns produce tangible results enabling discernment about customer identity, intent, and attitude. Plus, they enable marketers to help business units create more focused and efficient strategies, creative copy, and targeted placement.

At a large manufacturer, I desperately tried to convince business unit leaders and product managers that they needed this modern (digital) discipline to measure their effectiveness whenever they came up with a new marketing idea. They scoffed…and demanded that marketing do their bidding, which I did.

At the same time, I analyzed the performance of all promotions launched in the previous six months. (I had created and implemented a uniform scoring system just prior to the beginning of that six-month period). I wanted to know ‘so what?’ – what were the relative outcomes of all promotions during that period? The results (lightly scrubbed to conceal product names) are plotted below.

I plotted campaign-specific landing page visits by the percentage of conversions and divided the grid into quarters. The most successful marketing programs during that period were in the top right quadrant (high number of page visits and higher than average conversion rate). Their promotions all ended in the bottom left quadrant – and were the least successful. 

More importantly, it revealed opportunities that they had never considered.

• First, the most successful campaigns – the ones that brought the most visitors to the website and got them to complete forms – were simple apps that helped professionals calibrate their instruments when using a specific product. It had previously been ungated. With that information, we developed rich profiles of who was using the product and where they were on the value chain. The business (and distributors) developed follow-up sales processes and secured sales.
• Second, the second most successful campaigns involved harnessing sample request data. This large, global company gave away tons of samples to scientists, manufacturers, universities and customers. Unfortunately, no one had ever followed up with the organizations and individuals who had requested them. I created simple nurture campaigns to make sure they got the samples and ask them if they needed help. Sales saw an immediate impact on engaged leads. Marketing automation followed-up with the months afterward asking what they had done with the product – and they company was surprised how the requesters had used the product. That expanded the company’s understanding of the uses of those products.

What’s remarkable is this involved no advertising, no new marketing assets, or contentious meetings about the merits of a new program. It was harvesting what was already there and using.

The benefits to the company and business units were clear. Hopefully, the benefits to cross-department collaboration are also clear. We learned to trust one another, use a modern disciplined marketing process, rely on numbers and seek one another’s advice.