How do I market my product? Part V

The final topic I think we need to discuss is the issue of metrics. When it comes to metrics, marketing is always treading across a minefield. For one thing, there is really no linear connection between marketing and sales. Sorry marketing folks, while we may like to pat ourselves on the back and think that we sold the product, we can only make the sale possible. We do not have the ability to actually go out and execute on the sales that is the role of the sales team.

Sales and marketing and joined at the hip and neither can succeed without the other but both can fail if one entity does not fulfill its side of the bargain. So the question becomes, how do we measure success? How do we determine if a marketing plan was good and only failed because of sloppy execution or on the opposite, how do we determine if the marketing team passed onto sales poor materials to do the job.

I have to be honest that the first person who develops a rock solid, unassailable marketing metric will be like the person who invents the better mousetrap. The world will most likely beat a path to your door. That being said, there are some interesting ideas out there about how best to track marketing metrics. One I like is by looking at sales leads that have come in after the roll out of a marketing program and look at these leads at fixed periods of time. This should tell the marketing people how effective a job they have done in peaking the interest of target audiences. It does not make marketing beholding to sales and allows for an appropriate examination of who was responsible for the success or failure of a marketing campaign.

One thing I like as far as public relations is the idea of measure full coverage of an organization during a 3 to 6 month period. A lot of PR agencies are lazy and try to rest on mere mentions and include that as part of coverage. This is a colossal cop out and is simply a way to get recognition for picking off the low hanging fruit that they should be getting anyway. What I would recommend is that we identify one-half to a dozen top tier publications and ensure that we are in constant communication with them. During this period, there is ample time to draft either bylined articles, major pitches or work out from the editorial calendar existing pitches and secure major coverage.

I would recommend setting a floor that would expect at least X amount of pieces of coverage, depending on what you have that is of value. This will require an open and frank dialogue between both parties to ensure that the appropriate targets are set. Obviously, putting out a minor press release does not warrant the same amount of coverage as a major product announcement or business deal. This would require the frank discussions of goals that are all to often lacking in relationships with PR agencies. Clients defer to the agencies, the agencies are too happy to collect checks so they take the path of least resistance.

So in conclusion, metrics needs to be better refined and it will take trial and error. Until then, we will only have a nebulous idea of how successful our plan actually was.