And the Objective is…?

More than once in my days at the various companies I’ve worked for, I would find myself sitting in a meeting when about half-way through, the thought would come to me: Why are we having this meeting?  (If I was in the right mood, I’d ask the question to the rest of the group.)  I think we can all relate to this scenario, and have all been in enough of those meetings, wishing we could have those hours of our life back.

However, this dynamic isn’t only related to meetings.  It’s something that occurs within marketing departments every day.  A few years ago, I was part of a group that was responsible for analyzing the ROI of our company’s marketing activities.  As we were reviewing our tradeshow participation, one particular show stood out like a sore thumb because of its lack of ROI.  So as any good marketing team would do, we highlighted that show and several others as bad investments.  We marked them as shows that we would not participate in the following year.  Then one of the team members who had helped plan that show said, “Our goal with that show was not to generate leads. We participated so we could gain awareness within the vertical.  In addition to a sponsorship, we had 3 speaking engagements to drive our thought leadership.” This new information changed our team’s view of the show completely, and it highlighted an important point:  in order to achieve the proper measurement, the objective needed to be stated up front.

If in the pre-show planning it had been stated that this show was an awareness generator, then our team could have developed our metrics accordingly: How many people attended our sessions? How many people stopped by our booth? How much signage and advertisement did we have among the show material and on the show floor?  We could have conducted a pre and post show survey to measure our company’s brand recognition.  Instead, we applied the same measurement criteria to this show as we did to all of the other lead generation shows.  As a result, we almost axed a very important show for the following year.

So remember, when developing and measuring your campaigns, understand the purpose of each activity.  And state it up front.  From there, it will be much easier to measure against that purpose.

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