3 Tools to Get a Read on Marketing Performance in 30 Days

With management chomping at the bit to demonstrate that the company is getting a good return on their marketing investments, CMOs need to know whether new marketing programs are successful in 30 days.

No one seems willing to wait the customary six months to a year anymore. It’s no wonder, really. There's a different kind of urgency to demonstrating early results these days, besides which waiting six months often means it'll be too late to do anything to get maximum performance and meet management expectations.

Here are three tools you can use to get a quick read on the impact of marketing programs in 30 days:

1. Blog hyper-analysis
Use widely-available analysis tools to see if your campaign, program, or new product has inspired online conversation, positive or negative.

What it gives you: In theory at least, a high-performance campaign would generate quantity and you’d like to see something related to the brand message or new product. Could be an early warning if nothing’s happening, if conversation takes a negative turn, or there’s little mention of a new product or something related to the key brand message, for instance.

Set-up time: One week

Predictive validity: Fair

Ball-park costs: $30K

2. Souped-up campaign penetration tracking
Instead of looking at 25 different "awareness" metrics, we recommend developing a single measure that we call campaign penetration which incorporates most of the traditional measures into a single metric.

What it gives you: The advantage to using campaign penetration is that instead of having a bunch of numbers that fluctuate seemingly at random from one quarterly tracking study to the next, you get one number that tells you how a campaign is doing at generating “real” awareness for your brand and its key brand message. It also gives you a much better handle on a campaign’s impact on sales.

Set-up time: Two weeks

Predictive validity: Good

Ball-park costs: $50K

3. Novel applications of simulated test marketing
Simulated test marketing (STM), the single best validated tool in all of marketing research, can help you gauge the ROI of actual campaigns after they’ve been launched.

What it gives you: Though marketers often use them to forecast sales and profits of a new product/service or a new advertising campaign pre-launch, you can also use a cleverly done STM to improve a forecast 30 days post-launch. The idea here is that you can see where you are currently headed based on actual results. If it’s not where you’d expected, you’ve got time to take action.

Set-up time: Four weeks

Predictive validity: Very good

Ball-park costs: $100K

Now naturally, there are a few basic criteria that a program has to meet in order for these tools to give an effective read on performance:

• It’s a new and different campaign or new product.
• It’s a front-loaded effort.
• The media weight behind it is substantial enough to read the results.
• People care about the product category.

With blog hyper-analysis, for example, you’re generally looking at quantity and sentiment. You can imagine if it’s not a new effort, it’s going to be pretty tough to identify any sort of trends a campaign has inspired. Likewise, if there’ not substantial media weight behind a campaign or program, you’d expect to see low awareness for your brand and key brand message.

The big takeaway here is that you DON’T have to wait until it’s too late to do anything about performance to find out how a new campaign or product is doing. These three widely-available tools use different types of data and differing inputs, but all provide you with insights that can help you determine if you’re on your way to making the CEO happy or heading for disaster.

-March 2010

This content was provided by Copernicus Marketing Consulting and Research. Visit their website at www.copernicusmarketing.com.