Where is Your Bailout Plan?

October 21st, 2008 by Joy Brazelle

Part II – Marketers – Where is Your Bailout Plan?

In working with many companies over the years, it seems that marketers fall in to one of three categories:

Marketing Guru – You know your KPIs, your ROI and manage your campaigns to maximize ROI. Your boss loves you. Your budget is not in jeopardy. In fact, by proving a positive ROI even in this economy your budget may have been increased.

Marketer – You feel that you are doing okay, but sense things could be going better. You are currently sort of paying attention to analytics, but aren’t sure how to understand the data to make better decisions. Beware, your budget may be on the chopping block.

Old School Marketer – You’ve ignored all of the hype about online marketing, choosing to continue to focus on tradtional channels since that has what has worked (you guess) until now. Maybe you’ve even tried some banner ads or other ‘experimental marketing.’ You’ve seen some reports, but you’re not really sure what to make of them. Danger, danger – say good-bye to that marketing budget.

Marketing gurus are the exception to the rule. Don’t feel bad if you are not there yet. It takes a bit of a mind-shift and some discipline, but you can get there.

Most marketers fall into one of the other two categories – somewhere between knowing that you could be doing a better job to feeling completely helpless, worrying that your budget, or even worse, your job is on the line.

The first step is to take action – embrace analytics. There are tons of great resources; books, blogs or even companies you can hire. Once you understand how to use analytics to take the pulse of your marketing efforts, you can benchmark how they are doing and improve them.

By accepting and understanding analytics, the move from ‘Old School Marketer’ with an evaporating budget to a ‘Marketing Guru’ with a growing budget is only a matter of discipline. And by being able to prove that by spending some money, you are making more money (positive ROI), you will see your marketing budgets grow rather than disappear, even in a bad economy.

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