Let’s Start a Riot

Are you inciting people with a clear call to action? Photograph by Shemer.

What does it take to help your marketing group operate more effectively?

Based on our numerous marketing engagements, we’ve found that making your marketing program excel requires mastering five capabilities: marketing strategy, lead management, campaign management, event management and marketing measurement.

Best Practices for Campaign Management

Of Innoveer’s marketing effectiveness framework, here I’ll touch on campaign management: the step at which your organization must present prospective buyers with a call to action. To increase your campaign management proficiency, focus on these four best practices:

• List Development: Identify a target population of prospective customers based on program objectives and profile characteristics. To do this effectively, pay attention to data quality.
• Campaign Execution: Conduct the campaign—in other words, deliver key messages and a call to action to prospects through one or more channels. For best results, begin by testing it on a sizeable group, and then run the campaign in waves, and using the feedback to further refine subsequent waves. Remember to use the Web to your advantage. This isn’t 2002; you’re not emailing 10,000 postcards in one go.
• Message Management: Control the message being disseminated to each target group. What’s the message? That’s up to you. Just make sure you test it. A lot. For example, one of our customers buys Google ads for products it’s considering manufacturing, records the hits and then investigates building the most popular ones. It’s an extreme yet extremely useful form of testing (in this case via crowdsourcing).
• Response Management: The formal mechanism for identifying interested buyers via their response to a campaign call to action, or another indication of interest. This might be as simple as filling out an online form, downloading a white paper, returning a phone call or accepting a meeting.

Response Management Mechanisms

For response management, which mechanism works best? Really, you need to think through what will work best for your organization. For our high-technology customers, often it’s a download. For pharmaceutical or medical device customers, it’s coming to a seminar being hosted by an eminent physician on a hot topic.

For many organizations, offers are a vital response mechanism. For example, Innoveer customer Dice.com, the largest online technology jobs board, conducts a lot of email campaigns, often aimed at giving out offer to new or existing customers. For example, I recently received an email which said that I should use Dice for recruiting in 2010, and if I did so I’d receive a certain deal. Dice, of course, is looking for any responses to those deal offers, and constantly trying to determine if giving out a coupon—and what type of coupon—produces an optimal response.

Fix Faults First

In the Dice example, effectively managing responses is predicated on a number of other factors, including developing good lists (based on good leads), managing the message, and correctly executing the campaign. In other words, all of the above parts of campaign management—from lists and execution to message and response management—interconnects, meaning that deficiencies in one area will have repercussions in all of the others.

Accordingly, when trying to create more effective campaigns, you should benchmark your capabilities, and then first improve what you’re not good at. That will not only result in the biggest improvement in your campaign management capabilities, but also give you the biggest return on your investment.

Learn More

As you plan for upcoming marketing program enhancements, know the requirements for creating more effective marketing programs.