123 eGuides

1 Minute Advice: Resolve to Measure Your Marketing ROI

by Barry Silverstein

If you make just one business resolution this year, let it be this one: Don't do anything in marketing for which you can't measure ROI. Gone are the days when you could put out a press release, place an ad, or launch a website without accounting for results. Today, experienced senior executives at large companies and wise owners of small companies look at every marketing initiative as a Return On Investment (ROI) proposition.

But the real issue is that different marketers measure "Return" differently. For example, suppose an online video you post gets thousands of views, or an offer you make on Facebook generates hundreds of "Likes." Some marketers would analyze what it cost to elicit these responses and compute what would appear to be a pretty favorable ROI based on creating "awareness." Unfortunately, views and "Likes" just scratch the surface. The true ROI for a business should be determined by whether or not an initial contact converts into a prospect and, eventually, a customer.

That's why you need to force yourself to look for the hard ROI numbers, not the easy ones. You need to be able to track the action of a prospect, and the interaction of your organization with that prospect, from the very beginning of the contact cycle.  

Why? Because as Mike Volpe, CMO of marketing systems vendor Hubspot points out, there are marketing metrics a CEO "actually cares about," including:

• Customer Acquisition Cost: This is what it costs to acquire a customer. It consists of the total sales and marketing spent in a particular period, divided by the number of customers acquired in that period
• Customer Lifetime Value: This represents the current value of a customer. To compute it, writes Volpe, "take the revenue the customer pays you in a period, subtract out the gross margin, and then divide by the estimated churn % (cancellation rate) for that customer. "
• Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acqusition Cost: This ratio tells you the ROI of your acquisition efforts. According to Volpe, "a higher ratio means your Sales and Marketing have a higher ROI. Higher is not always better though; when the ratio is too high, you might want to spend more on Sales and Marketing to grow faster, because you are restraining your growth by under-spending, and making life easy for your competition."

So next time you think you're measuring the results of a marketing effort, resolve to go one step further and measure your marketing ROI.

Barry Silverstein is a brand marketing expert. He has written numerous 123 eGuides on branding, product launches, and sales leads, available here. He also teaches an on-demand online course, Big Brand Strategies for Small Brands. Regularly $39, the course is available until January 31 at the special price of just $19. Simply visit www.bigbrandstrategiesforsmallbrands.com and use the code newyear to take advantage of this offer.

1 Minute Advice: Are You Content with Your Content?

by Barry Silverstein

The marketers who will separate themselves from the pack in 2013 have something in common: They all strive to produce compelling content. 

Content has become a marketing buzzword in the past year, and this trend promises to continue throughout 2013.  According to a new study by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, 86 percent of Business-to-Consumer marketers employ content marketing. They use an average of twelve individual tactics, including these top five: social media, e-newsletters, videos, blogs, and in-person events.

Three key attributes of compelling content are:

Relevancy
Consumers want content that helps them live better, work better, or play better. That's why any content you produce must be relevant to your target audience and meet their specific needs.  (This is a good reason to do some analysis of your audience's characteristics before you create any content.) Content should not be a veiled sales pitch -- it should have intrinsic value to a customer or prospect whether or not they use your product or service. Offering high value content pays you back in the long run because recipients remember that you are the source.

Originality
Content should be original in the sense that the target audience believes it was written for them. This doesn't mean you can't repurpose something that you previously created, or re-issue information that was published elsewhere (with permission, of course). In fact, a great way to re-use information and make it look new is to re-package it into a new format, such as an "infographic." But the content shouldn't come across as something you just dusted off for re-use. This just diminshes its value. Put some thought into how your audience perceives the value of the content and be sure it feels fresh and new.

Timeliness
Content should be timely. One of the best ways to assure timeliness is to use current examples or reference current events. For example, business-to-business content concerning marketing campaigns would be much more timely if it referenced a few current campaigns. The content would be all the more relevant if the marketing campaigns were specific to the audience's job title or the industry of their company.

It takes a concerted effort to create quality content that is relevant, original, and timely -- but the marketers that make that effort are the ones who will stand apart in 2013.

Barry Silverstein is a brand marketing expert. He has written numerous 123 eGuides on branding, product launches, and sales leads, available here. He also teaches an on-demand online course, Big Brand Strategies for Small Brands. Regularly $39, the course is available until January 31 at the special price of $19. Simply visit www.bigbrandstrategiesforsmallbrands.com and use the code newyear to take advantage of this offer.

New Year Offer: Brand Strategies Online Course - Regularly $39, Now $19!

Every small business wants to look bigger and market its brands like the big guys. Big Brand Strategies for Small Brands, an online course taught by brand marketing expert Barry Silverstein, shows you how to do just that. You can take this multimedia course at any time, at your own pace. It offers a wealth of information, including specific strategies, tactics and techniques used by big brands that small brand marketers with small budgets can apply right away.

Big Brand Strategies for Small Brands is regularly $39, but to celebrate the new year, you can sign up today for just $19!

Go to www.bigbrandstrategiesforsmallbrands.com for complete details about the course. Then enter the code newyear and you will be able to take this course at the special price of $19 -- half off the regular $39 price. This special offer expires January 31, 2013.