Marketing Insights

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Marketing Effectiveness is the ability to impact and drive revenue. Plain and simple. This requires a conversation beyond mere execution best practices. We have a need to demonstrate impact beyond simple campaign engagement – marketers must demonstrate impact on revenue. How do we know what our current ability is today? What would improvement look like? Where do we begin?

After working with over 500 clients small and large, across many industries – Eloqua has developed the Marketing Effectiveness Model (MEM) to help you benchmark where you are today and provide guidance on how to optimize campaign performance and improve your marketing effectiveness.

Understand Your Customer
The first step towards improvement involves understanding your customer and your customer’s evaluation process. This requires tracking profile information to tell you if they are in your ideal target profile as well as behavior to tell you what stage they are in during their evaluation process.

Fig.1 Understand Your Customer's Evaluation Process

Understanding how your customer evaluates your offering allows you to create campaigns that maximize value to your customers (VOLUME) and accelerate their purchase process (VELOCITY). What levers can you pull to increase volume and velocity of the customer’s evaluation process?

• Increase Conversion: You can optimize calls-to-action to get more buyers to raise their hands.
• Increase Revenue:You can build a relationship with the buyer that creates demand for more or premium products and services.
• Increase Speed:You can accelerate the consideration process by getting the right information at the right time to buyers.
• Increase Efficiency:You can better leverage and scale integrated marketing communications to maximize every dollar spent.

The key is to really understand the opportunities you have to pull those levers. By mapping your customer’s evaluation process to your integrated sales and marketing processes you create more opportunities to pull the levers and can communicate more effectively.

Campaign Assessment
What is your current ability is to communicate and persuade your target buyer?

• Batch and Blast: “Hey world, we have a product for you. Are you interested?” Reactive state, immature processes, lack of reporting on marketing effectiveness.
• Segment: “Hey meaningful target customer segment, we have helped others like you in the following ways.” Targeting strategy, documented processes, measuring beyond the click-through.
• One-to-One: “Hey Mr. X, based on your preferences, we think you specifically would be interested in the following.” Holistic and personalized education and nurturing campaign strategy in place for customers. According to Jupiter Research, campaigns executed with this level of sophistication outperform Batch and Blast campaigns 4 to 1.
• Right-Time, Right-Message: The ability to respond at the moment the customer is engaging – at the right-time, with the right-message, delivered via the right-channel. Campaign measurement is in a state of continuous process improvement.

Fig.2 The Stages of Marketing Effectiveness

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 Quick check – where do you think your organization is today? Where do you want to go?

Campaign Optimization
Once you know where you are and where you are going, the Eloqua MEM breaks down campaign optimization into 4 key essential areas of evaluation. From here, recommendations can be made on how to advance to the next stage.

• Lead Management: The communication and alignment across sales and marketing. How aligned are your sales and marketing functions? Do you have a documented lead flow process? What are the key handoff points between sales and marketing? How do you communicate lead activity to sales? How do you empower sales to respond?
• Contact Management: The ability to segment and target your contact database. Do you leverage user personas? How do you acquire and manage the data required for segmentation? How do you mange contact communication preferences?
• Campaign Management: How to plan, manage, and execute campaigns. How do you plan your campaigns? Are you executing to a campaign checklist so they are executed consistently? How do you identify opportunities for automation?
• Marketing Effectiveness Measurement: The key success metrics and marketing effectiveness benchmarks. How are you rolling up campaign performance reporting? How are you tracking tactical campaign asset performance? What is your revenue attribution model?

Fig.3 Opportunities for Optimization

The Eloqua Marketing Effectiveness Matrix can be used to assess where you are in each of the four disciplines of marketing effectiveness. From here, recommendations can be made on how to advance to the next stage. This blog will feature many recommendations and best practices, organized topically by each of these 4 areas.

Fig.4 Eloqua's Marketing Effectiveness Model Matrix

Benchmarking Performance
Marketing Effectiveness is the ability to impact and drive revenue - therefore, your measurement requires us to look beyond campaign engagement to understand what happened with the potential buyer once he expressed interest. You need to determine a campaign revenue attribution model and use it to identify where best practices are adopted and improvement occurs. This also helps you to identify improvement over time.

Industry benchmarks are always a helpful guide – but the best way to benchmark is against your own performance. This will help you set the realistic and achievable improvement targets quarter over quarter and year over year.

What is your marketing effectiveness benchmark today? If you don’t know the answer to this question, your answer today quite possibly may be 0. The goal is get to a state where you can measure your marketing effectiveness and then watch the trend lines from there.

Fig.5 Performance Benchmark Example - Inquiry to Marketing Qualified Lead Conversion