Measure the return on your marketing investment - five crucial steps

Smart businesses measure the return on marketing investment fastidiously. Otherwise, how would they know whether to continue to invest in a particular approach? The reality is that it's not always easy to attribute results to 'marketing inputs'. So here are our five top tips on measuring return on investment in the real world.

  1. Keep a win/loss analysis spreadsheet which details all opportunities, the lead source, touchpoints the contact has had with the business and the reason for win or loss. This is an invaluable way to ensure that important information is sought out, stored and can later be evaluated en masse by product, sales person, industry etc
  2. Build a strong contact management system which records touchpoints with each contact and if possible draws these together to record by organisation aswell.
  3. Update progress against objectives monthly and disseminate within the business (including Heads if appropriate). Keep this data factual – no analysis. Hold a quarterly checkpoint meeting to discuss, analyse and brainstorm progress against objectives. Agree and commit to actions – record progress against these on a monthly basis (again factual information only).
  4. Agree a customer feedback programme for example a short questionnaire that is sent out at the end of every project (or major milestone in large projects). Follow this up with an annual telephone/face to face interview with each client. Use both data collection mechanisms to generate testimonials. Do not use them to develop business.
  5. Record everything – for example if you run an event, record as many aspects (cost, event profile, invitation response rate, attendance rate, opportunites/meetings, new business agreed). Everything you record will help you plan a better event next time. The same rule applies for press articles, case studies, white papers, referral programmes, website enquiries. At the end of a quarter or year, it is then an easy job to pull together an analysis of the success of the marketing programme. Gathering this data retrospectively is virtually impossible.