Blogging On (or is it "Blogging In"?)

OK. I'm back.

I actually got quite a few requests to resume this blog, even though there were very few comments posted during the year I ran it originally. Plus, it seems to do REALLY well on Google organic search results.

So what have I learned?

1. Blogging on a subject matter like marketing measurement is less about the number of engaged readers than it is the quality of engagement of a few.

2. Blogging is far more about building a well-rounded web marketing presence. No single piece of the puzzle puts one over the top on search results. It's constant experimentation. Having dropped the blog for a while, I can tell you we saw a clear drop in performance of our organic search traffic.

3. Social media is so immature at this point that we're experimenting with many platform components from Twitter (follow me as "measureman") to feedster, to several dozen other elements. The cost of experimentation is high, and I used to think we weren't making sufficient progress towards any real insight. Then I had a bit of an epiphany... the experimentation process really IS the marketing process. Experimentation isn't just what we do to get to a marketing plan. The marketing plan is a summary of how we're experimenting with various methods, tools, and messages to get the desired results.

If you're interested in how we're measuring our own results here at MarketingNPV, shoot me an email and we can talk about the specific metrics.

Knowing Is Believing

Now that 2008 budget season is upon us, it’s time to identify knowledge gaps in the assumptions underlying your marketing plan – and to lay out (and fund) a strategy for filling them.

We recently published a piece in MarketingNPV Journal which tackles this issue. In “Searching for Better Planning Assumptions? Start with the Unknowns” we suggested:

A marketing team’s ability to plan effectively is a function of the knowns and the unknowns of the expected impact of each element of the marketing mix. Too often, unfortunately, the unknowns outweigh the hard facts. Codified knowledge is frequently limited to how much money lies in the budget and how marketing has allocated those dollars in the past. Far less is known (or shared) about the return received for every dollar invested. As a result, marketers are left to fill the gaps with a mix of assumptions, conventional wisdom, and the occasional wild guess – not exactly a combination that fills a CMO with confidence when asked to recommend and defend next year’s proposed budget to the executive team.

Based on our experience and that of some of our CMO clients, we offer a framework to help CMOs get their arms around what they know, what they think they know, and what they need to know about their marketing investments. The three steps are:

1. Audit your knowledge. The starting point for a budget plan comes in the form of a question: What do we need to know? The key is to identify the knowledge gaps that, once filled, can lessen the uncertainty around the unknown elements, which will give you more confidence to make game-changing decisions.

2. Prioritize the gaps. For each gap or unanswered question, it’s important to ask how a particular piece of information would change the decision process. It might cause you, for example, to completely rethink the scope of a new program, which could have a material impact on marketing performance.

3. Get creative with your testing methods. Marketers have many methods for filling the gaps at their disposal; some are commonly used, others are underutilized. The key is determining the most cost-effective methods – from secondary research to experimental design techniques – to gather the most relevant information.

Don’t let the unknowns persist another year. Find ways to identify them, prioritize them, and fund some exploratory work so you’re legitimately smarter when the next planning season rolls around.