Measuring success from marketing - KPI's

In the summer of 2008, Alastair Darling announced things were going to get as bad as they had ever been since the great depression. In response to this, as a core part of our business Aspect now offers our clients detailed matrices to view how their marketing investment is performing.

We have devised our own unique methodology for measuring marketing success. There are a number of core measures we would all expect, for example measuring visits to a web site the day an advert is placed. However, there are specific commercial goals each client has and Aspect integrates these, alongside our own measuring system. We then agree with each client the timeline for reviewing the success, be that weekly, monthly or quarterly; this is usually determined by the amount of activity, length of campaign etc.

The approach allows for two things to happen, firstly the discipline of measuring and secondly collaborative analysis – a joined up ‘team’ approach where client and Aspect examine together what worked, how either party can improve and whether anything else should be measured – this way we are all stakeholders in the campaign success.

We have outlined two recent examples which demonstrate the benefit of this approach to clients:

1. A trade travel group – Aspect was appointed to run a trade ad campaign. The ads increased inbound enquiries, particularly visits to the website. However, this resulted in only a small increase in new business. When we went over the process it became clear the website did not connect to the campaign messages. Identifying this problem presented a solution to run with for the next campaign.

2. An energy client – a mixed media campaign running over 12 months, we are currently nine months through. As well as the core matrix, we agreed with the client three commercial goals i. an increase in inbound calls, ii. more blue chip clients and iii. a measure of gig sold – this tells them what their growth forecast should be (this case study is in our proposal). We meet each quarter with the client and it was at one of these meetings that we identified that their salespeople were facing a daily challenge overcoming a specific ‘objection’ from prospective customers. We proposed a sales process evaluation seminar – in this the objection was unravelled and Aspect devised a mechanism to handle this and overcome the objection. Sales increased instantly.

The external objective consulting work of Aspect is a core part of our added value. The components of our DNA consulting are applied again and again for clients throughout projects. When we meet to evaluate the statistics, Aspect collate these within an Excel file so month by month measuring can be assessed.