How Do You Measure Success?

Custom content good for ROI

eMarketer, October 22, 2009 — Nearly three-quarters of companies have guidelines to measure the success of their marketing programs, and for one-half such measurements are a requirement for obtaining marketing funding, according to the King Fish Media “2009 Survey on Marketing, Media and Measurement,” conducted in partnership with HubSpot, Junta42 and the Upshot Institute.

A Few Good Things to Come Out of the Recession†

Five Accelerating Trends That Will Reshape Marketing

Advertising Age, August 26, 2009 — I'm sure I'm not the first one to tell you: We're in a recession.

The doom has advertisers hanging signs along the lines of "Will Work For Food" on their agency walls, and marketers continue to face facts and figures like these, from Forrester's 2009 Global CMO Recession Survey: 71% of marketing budgets have been reduced this year, and more than half reported reductions greater than 20%.

Now here comes the curveball: I think this might be the best thing that has happened to our industry in decades.

A Memo to the CEO: Marketing Matters

Prophet, June 2, 2009 — Michael Dunn recently spoke to Consulting about The Marketing Accountability Imperative. This interview reviews the book's tools, metrics, and anecdotes designed to help marketers navigate through this new landscape by proving ROI and communicating their mission and results more effectively with the executives in the corner offices.

Marketers Search For Social Media Metric

MediaPost Publications, May 7, 2009 — Marketers place a lifetime value on customers with addresses on its email list based on their purchasing activity. For Netflix, it could be $9. At US Airways, maybe $2. But how do you place a similar value on a person who is active on a company's Facebook or MySpace page? With social-networking booming, marketers are now in hot pursuit of the metric.

The Future of Social Media Monitoring

ReadWriteWeb, April 15, 2009 — Ten years ago the ClueTrain manifesto said that "markets are conversations" but today a more pertinent statement could be that conversations are becoming markets - or that there's a market for monitoring conversations. A whole class of technologies are emerging to help companies keep track of the conversations exploding online.

Producing Accountability in Hard Times†

CMOs' Perennial Charge Is Even Tougher Now -- but Not Impossible

Advertising Age, January 12, 2009 — Accountability is clearly keeping marketers up at night as the economic crisis continues to thread its way across industries around the globe and 2009 budgets come under greater scrutiny. So with economies performing badly in ways not seen in decades, all marketers should have a method-based and actionable answer to why marketing dollars are not a dispensable spending item but instead an investment with measurable ROI.