It’s getting to be the time of year for Dynamics ISVs and partners to begin marketing planning for next year. Of course, those plans are best done predicated on what happened in the year just concluding. Which programs worked well enough that you want to do more of those next year? Which ones were disappointments, necessitating adjustment, or even elimination?
The questions seem simple and obvious enough. But answering them can be tricky, because the obvious answer isn’t always the correct answer. Here is why:
The ‘numbers’ can be misleading. For example, when it comes to reviewing sales leads generated by your company’s marketing programs, you obviously want as many sales leads as possible. The planning conclusion seems obvious — you keep the programs that generated the most sales leads, and reduce or eliminate those that disappointed….until you try to explain why some programs produced fewer sales leads than expected, and others produced more than expected. The ones that disappointed seem to stick out the most, especially if you had high hopes for particular ones. It’s tempting to blame the nature of the program….i.e. ‘Videos just don’t work for us.’ But there may be more at work, like the title you gave to particular videos, or the topics you chose. Which leads to the next issue….
Are there underlying trends at work? The numbers can become clearer if you have data over a period of time. For example, if you see that leads from white papers have declined during 2021, you may want to investigate what the overall trend with white paper demand has been in previous years. Have there been peaks and valleys before? Do they correlate with particular circumstances — for example, perhaps you had an especially talented editor scoping out the topics for white papers in years when they did very well. And then there’s one other matter…
What is the ‘quality’ of the leads you generated? More leads don’t necessarily translate into better leads. To answer this question accurately, you need to be able determine how many leads resulted in specific sales, and how much revenue each generated. Now you’re getting a fuller picture of cause-and-effect.
Answering each of these questions fully begins to provide insights into your marketing program’s ‘productivity’ — that is, how well specific initiatives are translating into sales and revenues. How do you go about improving marketing productivity? Generally speaking, you improve productivity by making specific adjustments to your overall program. For example, you may need to shift your content creation strategy, to possibly weigh your efforts more toward panel discussions and away from company videos, or vice versa. You may also decide your program needs to become more precisely targeted than it has been, and you’ll want to take advantage of MSDynamicsWorld’s ever-more-delineated marketing categories. Similarly, you may decide to hone in on buyers who meet particular demographic or executive level requirements.
Based on our extensive work helping develop sales leads for Dynamics solution providers and partners, MSDW is developing new tools to enable marketers to dig even deeper into the lead-related data their programs generate. We will be rolling those tools out over the course of the next year to help make next year’s marketing program analysis ever more productive.
