With so many new advances in technology and marketing, analysis of marketing to meet business objectives is not always cut and dry. While return on investment analysis allows a corporation to see their marketing budget hard at work, alone it is ineffective in illustrating the success of marketing efforts. Effectiveness of marketing tools and execution of sales are key elements that must be taken into account when evaluating performance. Strategic research and implementation are examples of key factors in a winning marketing campaign. Such unquantifiable investments do not get factored into ROI analysis and can be very misleading for corporations.

One of the major drawbacks of ROI analysis is that it can not pinpoint the reason for a financial failure, it can simply show in a quantitative language that goals were not met. ROI analysis can let a corporation know that its strategic goals, outlined by the expectations, were not met, while failing to show other objectives that were achieved in the process. For instance, ROI analysis might show that sales figures did not met expectations but may fail to show that there was an increase in foot traffic in shores. Such analysis will fail to show a corporation that their weakness may lie in product quality or the effectiveness of their sales force. It is not uncommon for corporations to get lost in the numbers that their marketing techniques generate. While prospects are critical to marketing success it crucial for a company to be able to nurture prospects into leads, and leads into sales and profits.  It is essential that corporations not lose site of focusing on generating quality leads and ensuring that their marketing target goals are met. To achieve maximum efficiency marketing goals must be kept as a corner stone of all marketing decisions but maintain a level of flexibility that will allow for change.

Optimizing marketing effectiveness is rarely a single step process. Marketing effectiveness incorporates corporate, competitive, consumer and exogenous factors. All four factors are critical in understanding and gauging the success of marketing techniques but are frequently not quantifiable in a way that can be incorporated into ROI analysis. It is important for corporations to analyze and examine each factor, and individual aspects of each factor, to see the impact or short comings of marketing techniques. By looking at each factor individually corporations will be able to come up with a more exact and strategic picture of their marketing campaigns.

ROI is one of the best tools a company can use to analyze its marketing technique, but it is crucial that ROI analysis is not the single measure a corporation uses in its analysis of its marketing operations. Utilizing ROI analysis alone is in effect “throwing the baby out with the bath water.” At a time when corporations need to maximize their budgets and time to market can determine a corporations success it is more important than ever that companies do more strategic analysis of their marketing, and not rely simply on the quantitative results of ROI analysis.

Read More…

• Back to Basics Marketing
• Marketing as Company Wide Responsibility
• Mobilization: Reaching Outside the Marketing Department
• Advanced Lead Qualification: Sales and Marketing Work Together
• Sales’ Feedback into Marketing: Profiling Prospects and Their Problems
• “Inside Marketing”: Marketing to Your Own Sales Organization
• Developing Unique, Customer-Focused Value Propositions
• How to Train an Entry-Level Marketing Employee
• You Are Here When Return on Investment Doesn’t Paint a Full Picture
• Defining and Presenting Value Propositions in a Competitive Market
• Logos and Promotional Product Designs for “Difficult” Subjects
• Defining and Refining Value Propositions for Luxury Items
• Evaluating Return-On-Investment (ROI) for Tradeshow Activities
• Management Mistake in Small Business: No Investment during Trying Times