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Building a Successful Marketing Dashboard

January 10, 2009 By Kelly Harman Leave a Comment

The marketing mix is getting more and more complicated. It was hard enough to track the results of advertising campaigns, tradeshows and direct mail programs. Now you’ve got search engine marketing, banner ads, pay per click advertising, social networking, mobile marketing and a plethora of other tools at your disposal. One thing that hasn’t changed though is the need to track your results, monitor the performance of your campaigns and measure the return on investment.Marketing Dashboards

Marketing dashboards are a great way of measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing programs. Simply put, a marketing dashboard pulls all the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you are tracking for each marketing initiative and displays this information in a graphical format. It allows you to easily identify those KPIs that are not meeting expectations so that you can move quickly to adjust a poorly performing campaign. Conversely, you can also quickly identify the campaigns that are kicking butt – and put more time, money and effort into expanding the successful programs. In addition to providing both recognition and accountability for the marketing function, it creates a stronger argument for budget dollars and larger campaigns when programs are working successfully. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing, Online Strategies

Profit Partners

December 28, 2008 By Kelly Harman Leave a Comment

I was recently a guest on Profit Partners, a local television show dedicated to helping small business grow into larger ones. It was a great experience.

The Profit Partner Presents Kelly Harman from Innovative Video Productions on Vimeo.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: business planning, Marketing, sales, Sales, Strategy

Five “Gut Checks” for the marketing plan

December 21, 2008 By Kelly Harman Leave a Comment

This is the time of year when marketeers everywhere are putting the final touches on next year’s marketing plan.  A good plan doesn’t have to be complicated.  In fact, the simpler the better.  Every business I know is tightening the budget and looking for measurable ROI on every activity.  So it makes sense to do a few things very well instead of a shallow attempt at 25 different marketing activities.  Also, remember that a marketing plan is a guide, not a mandate.  Things that appear to be a good idea now may not perform well when actually executed.  Flexibility is key and data is everything.  If you can’t measure what you do then you probably need to question whether it should be in the marketing mix to begin with.

With that said, here are some things we hope you’ve taken into consideration when finishing up your marketing plan for 2009:

  1. Collaborate with the sales team.  Have you met with the VP of Sales and discussed the objectives for 2009?  Have you attended the sales meetings on a regular basis?  Do you know how the pipeline works and do you have a written agreement with the VP of Sales that describes exactly what qualifies as a lead from the marketing department? This way, you can avoid the conversation in July when you say you generated 2,000 leads and they say you generated 20. [Read more...]
Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: Marketing, marketing plans, sales, Strategy
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