Clients ask us all the time. Our answer: depends on what you’re trying to do and whether you’re committed to an ongoing honest dialogue with your markets. If you’re trying to sell a story in social media, we’d advise you not to bother. If you’re up for learning what your buyers want, imaginative in finding creative ways to reach them, and capable of articulating how your product or service meets those needs…or not…then it’s a potent channel, to be nurtured and nourished like any other powerful medium. But marketers beware…marketing was once about creating a dream, and now it’s about being clear, concise, transparent and relevant. Without these, you’ll do more harm than good.
Category Archives: Technology
Dashboards: Measure what Matters
The increased attention on marketing ROI and the customer experience has produced an increased interest in the development and use of dashboards in the marketing/CRM environment. The article “Dashboards: No Longer a Luxury” from 1-to-1 Magazine clearly points that out. The fact that everyone wants dashboards is positive, since measurement drives more informed—and therefore better—decisions, but the reality is that few succeed in creating dashboards that are truly valuable management tools. The pitfalls of most dashboards are that they measure too much which creates information overload and/or they measure the wrong things.
To be effective, dashboards should comprise no more than five or six measurements, which should be a blend of results metrics (e.g., sales, leads) and operational performance metrics (e.g., call resolution statistics, outbound call volume).
- Results measurement should focus on the two or three numbers that will provide a “snapshot” of the health of the business/functional area. The numbers should be able to provide either an early warning of issues requiring intervention or reassurance of the state of the status quo.
- Operational measurements should focus on quantifying the operational activities that drive positive results. For example, if you can correlate customer training attendance to customer satisfaction and repeat business, you should be monitoring training attendance rates.
Dashboards can and should be a valuable tool for management to understand at a glance the state of the business and the progress towards goals, but only if it’s focused on the right measurements.
Use of Incentives: Proceed with Caution
Effective use of incentives like coffee cards and gas cards requires both an understanding of the strategic context and a feel for customer behavior. A simple assessment (high/moderate/low) of key variables will provide a clear picture of the applicability and potential desired magnitude of a campaign incentive.
The three most important variables (and their assessment scale) when weighing the value of incentives are:
- The strategic value of the action to the company (a “high” assessment supports incentive use)
- The perceived benefit of the action to the respondent (“low” supports incentive use)
- The barrier(s) to desired action (“high” supports incentive use)
For example, compelling responses to a web-based market research survey have:
- Moderate strategic value since it’s several steps removed from revenue generation
- Low perceived benefit to the respondent
- A high barrier to action assuming the survey is more than a few questions long
Together, these ratings point to this being a solid use of incentives.
On the other hand, a poor application of using an incentive would be to drive someone simply to visit a website or respond to an email: the strategic value is low because providing an incentive trains the customer/prospect to respond to incentives rather than content, the perceived benefit to the respondent is moderate, and the barrier to action is low.