By Nadine Leber
Most marketing campaigns aim to increase sales. However, tracking the impact on sales for every marketing channel, and across channels, has been a bit like the search for the Holy Grail. Traditional measurement methods, geared towards analyzing the impact of each individual marketing tool, often distort the cumulative impact of the entire program.
Recent studies have shown that marketers spend more money on TV advertising but online campaigns get the better return on investment. As a result we will see budgets shifting towards digital marketing campaigns in 2013. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) Online Video study, conducted by Nielsen, states that marketing dollars are being re-allocated from TV to online video to expand a campaign’s range, and benefiting from a lower cost.
With the use of multiple screens on the rise and people Tweeting, Face booking or doing online searches while watching TV, the interdependency of the marketing channels is more evident than ever.
For example, watching a TV spot can prompt the consumer to go to the company´s homepage and find out more details about the product. The consumer could be inspired to Google “coffee“, click on an Adwords campaign or browse through the organic search results. Consumers also like to watch new – entertaining – ads on YouTube, and share them via Twitter and Facebook.
Customer Engagement across Marketing, Sales and Service
Digital media channels and tracking techniques give marketers access to large quantities of information about the consumers buying behavior and their preferences. They have at their disposition better analytical systems to track and measure every mouse click of their consumer. With the implementation of CRM systems, marketers started to turn these insights into programs that help them to better engage with consumers and, ultimately, sell better. CRM programs are the glue that can keep marketing, sales, and services aligned.
With a more holistic picture – across marketing, sales and service – the planning, executing and measurement of marketing program activities has become more complex. Marketers collecting online, offline and mobile data must conduct cross-channel analysis to evaluate the overall impact of integrated campaigns on the bottom line. The need for analytics has increased.
CRM 2.0 Focuses On Cross-Channel Measurement
In a multi-channel world, a world that blurs the lines between marketing, sales and services, companies need new sophisticated data analytics techniques to determine the best outcome and the overall impact of their marketing activities on customer engagement and competitive positioning.
The era of CRM 2.0 has begun. New analytical tools help companies gather big data in real time to calculate cross-media and cross-channel effects, of
ten by using cloud computing. There are more than a few choices. For an overview of the Top Ten CRM software solutions, take a look at www.crmsolutioncomparison.com. The global research and advisory firm Forrester maps predictive analytics solutions by market presence and the strength of their offering.
The new technique solutions look backwards and forwards and measure the enormous amount of data for the best solution of the marketing strategy. They improve marketing opportunities by collecting, analyzing and filtering essential data.
The credo of the measurability is to find the most effective budget allocation to get the biggest impact – across all channels. With this new range of analytical methods companies now have a way to figure it all out, at least large parts of it; they can optimize their marketing strategy and increase customer engagement.