Being a marketer at a technology company has many benefits, particularly if it’s marketing technology. For me, marketing has always been challenging when it comes to justifying return on invest of marketing initiatives. The best way to measure return on investment is to collect information at every step of a marketing initiative. For example, if you’re doing email marketing, track the results. Most email marketing programs provide results on who opened, clicked through, bounced and unsubscribed to your emails. Some even go further with tracking activity from your email to your web site capturing every link or web page recipients have gone to and collecting information on those vistors as they return in the future. Collecting this data over time provides you with information that will help you determine the value of the campaign and what works best for future campaigns. I could go on and on about his, but my point here is that the more companies I talk to, the more I learn that they aren’t collecting tracking information or have no solutions in place to do so. Let’s face it, the only way marketers are going to be able to justify their campaigns and obtain bigger budgets that are needed to execute these campaigns is with historical data. Technology can provide that today. Take advantage of it! There are many marketing automation solutions on the market that can provide this for you. I’ll be mentioning them in my blog from time to time so stay tuned.
