Don't sweat marketing measurement on your way to building an effective marketing strategy

Any marketing measurement system based solely on circulation, clicks, impressions, advertising equivalency or whatever is flawed.

The only measurement that matters is measurement that truly shows how effective you are at reaching your customers.

Traditional B2B marketing measurement is especially tough because anything you do impacts everything else you do. How does your PR impact your PPC? How does your PPC impact your SEO? How does your SEO impact your website? How does your website impact your direct mail? And vice versa, and so on.

In looking at various measurement methodologies, it seems few actually demonstrate a measurable connection between the multiple activities that define true multi-channel B2B marketing and the sales pipeline.

Finally, as a last insult to simplicity, the measurement methods you use for your company will have little bearing on the measurement someone else uses for their company. In B2B marketing and sales, benchmarks and best practices are hard to find. Everyone measures and values certain tactics differently. My media mix and your media mix are not the same. Your sales approach and my sales approach are not the same.

So what to do?

First, don't sweat it.

No matter how trivial or important the tactic, assign it a key performance indicator (a KPI).

A KPI is a quantifiable measurement, agreed to beforehand, that reflects the critical success factors of a certain tactic. The KPI for your web-site's performance may be the unique visitors or the number of inquiries or any other metric that is important to you. The KPI for your media relations activities might be press mentions or advertising equivalency. Whatever the KPI, it should be binary. This means, at the end of each month, you should know if you achieved or did not achieve your KPI. If your KPI for your website is 1000 unique visitors per month, then you know with certainty at the end of the month whether or not you achieved your web KPI. Likewise, if your monthly public relations KPI is 4 or more mentions about your company every 30 day period, you know with certainty whether or not you achieved your KPI.

Next, if you have 10 tactics and 10 KPIs, force rank every KPI on a 1 to 10 score with 10 being most important and 1 being least important. If you have 104 tactics and 104 KPIs, force rank every KPI on a 1 to 104 score with 104 being most important. This

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