One of the most common requests that bubbles up in some of the marketing professional forums is how do I justify and find ROI around the work that I do.
This particular request is even more predominate in professional service firms who are measuring time invested against return and staff utilization. The trouble with this in the marketing space is that the marketing seeds that are planted today and the time invested today can sometimes take a good two to three years to be realized.
You also have a progressive measure.
For Example: You might start working on building up the market to grow a set of standardized lunch and learns, but the first lunch and learn could have a smaller audience than your lunch and learns later in the year. Measuring can take a number of forms.
1) You can measure total attendence.
2) You can categorize and then measure total attendees, such as people who are attending for training credit, people who are interested in a new product, clients who are getting value add from your company, business development connections who will be better referral sources and more.
3) You can measure total number of people invited versus total number of people who attended.
4) You can measure total people within certain titled roles such as CxO vs. Administrative staff.
and the list goes on. One of the things you can't do is easily measure any of the above without the support of some good software tools. Now it is true that you can create numerous Excel spreadsheets, but this is not the best system. In fact if you really thought about it, you could consider using Excel fairly manual.
One of the features that has been built into Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the ability to track an entire campaign. In my example above a campaign could be 2008 Lunch and Learns or it could be configured to focus on one specific lunch and learn event. A campaign tracks all of the different tasks associated with getting this event off the ground, the time associated with any activities, the mailing list or lists of people, the responses from said people and more.
Many firms have not used campaign tracking so I recommend you start small and build up your knowledge as time goes on!
