Pushing the Marketing Metrics Envelope

This time of year everyone is busy planning for 2007 so the Blog entries are few and far between.

A couple weeks ago I spoke at the emetrics conference in Washington DC. It was definitely interesting to interact with data driven marketers from arround the world.  Companies like Dell and AOL have some very smart people using data to make decisions that can instantly increase sales by millions of dollars in a single day.  I found that most of the data driven marketers were using similar marketing processes to the one we’ve implemented at my current venture.

I also met Rex Briggs at the conference.  He’s just completed an interesting research study where he worked with many forture 500 companies over the last five years and used cutting edge methods to track the effectiveness of their advertising across all media.  He then identified those marketing teams that had the most efficient advertising spend and looked at what they were doing differently.  All of his findings are published in a book called What Sticks.  I highly recommend it.  Again his ultimate findings are that the most effective marketers use a similar approach to us.

All of my research has been in an attempt to discover ways to improve our marketing process.  While I have discovered a few useful minor elements, I’ve also been able to validate that our highly effective marketing approach works for companies of all sizes.  It’s also great to interact with other marketers that are working to push the envelop of effective marketing by using detailed analysis and an continuous improvement testing approach.