It’s a classic dilemma for the entire marketing team – from marketing assistant to marketing manager through to CMOs, for specialists in digital marketing, direct marketing , SEO, social media and events…

How do you demonstrate and prove the impact of your marketing strategy?

It’s a related topic to measuring ROI – but it’s also so much more than that. ‘Impact’ doesn’t just cover revenue vs. cost – it could also mean an uplift in overall lead generation quality, or a shortening of the time taken for the lead > customer journey to complete. It could include improved customer satisfaction metrics via sentiment analysis, or a reduction in costs, or many more things more besides.

The priority of metrics used to measure a marketing department’s efficiency will always be decided by the company board. However, technology can make a big difference to how easy those metrics are to access, present and analyse. And if you’re serious about measuring marketing’s impact against marketing objectives, you need to ensure that the platform you use to manage your campaigns is sophisticated, intuitive and responsive.

It is essential to ensure that your entire marketing department is working from the same marketing automation platform. This means that information-sharing is straightforward, not just between marketing disciplines but also across every stage of the campaign cycle, from planning, through implementation to analysis and evaluation. And of course, the centralised platform should integrate seamlessly into your customer relationship management (CRM) system, ensuring that such information-sharing doesn’t hit bottlenecks when prospects become customers.

Regardless of which metrics are required, marketing software should be able to respond, providing real-time analytics on spend, lead quality and lead time, prospect > customer journey plus customer and prospect sentiment. It should offer highly sophisticated and flexible lead scoring mechanisms, so that each lead is automatically passed to sales once it reaches a ‘tipping point’ that’s relevant for the business. In this way, the marketing department’s impact is measured not just by the board, but by its relationship with sales.

In short, you need a marketing management platform that is built with reporting and analytics at its core just as much as day-to-day campaign management and marketing strategies – a platform like Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. Which, integrates smoothly with a range of CRM systems, not just Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Marketing platforms such as Dynamics Marketing help marketers plan and implement activities, manage multi-channel campaigns, attract and deliver leads, collaborate with sales, engage with social platforms and analyse marketing effectiveness – all in one easy to use interface. Prodware is a Microsoft Gold Partner and an expert advisor and integrator of Microsoft Dynamics applications. Contact us today for a free consultation.