The planning season for 2011 has begun. How will you improve your marketing effectiveness?

Your marketing plan should include direct increase to profits, but it might also drive results such as an increase in market share, brand value or share prices.  Your plan might focus on customer and/or employee retention.

Here are 5 questions to ask yourself as you get your planning on track:

ONE:  What do you want to achieve in 2011?

Brainstorm a list.  You can cull it back to a realistic and manageable set of goals later.  Answers might include things such as

• More qualified leads
• More customers through the front door
• More return customers
• More dollars per customer
• More time off for the business owner
• Ability to provide health insurance for employees
• Increase in brand awareness
• National attention
• Award achievement
• World Peace

TWO  How will you know if you met your goals?

• You can’t manage without measuring. What will it take for you to measure each of these areas?
• Don’t measure the easy things, measure the right things.  Ask yourself what you’re going to do with the answer when you get it, and what that’s worth to you..

THREE  Do you have a line item in the budget for gathering information and analyzing it?

• You can’t manage without measuring!
• 3% to 5% of the marketing budget is realistic to spend here;
• You can’t manage without measuring!

FOUR  Is your budget goal-based?

• Change your outlook from budgeting by media (TV, Radio, Internet) to budgeting based on your objectives.

FIVE  Do you have a line item in the budget for testing new channels?

• If you’ve never done direct mail or social media, or radio, or screaming from the top of the North Head Lighthouse, budget for some tests and see how they pay off.  You might be surprised.
• 1% of the marketing budget is realistic.

Sharpen your pencil and get that brainstorming going!  If you’re spending more than 15 minutes on this whole process, you’re thinking too hard.  There’s plenty of time for that later.  Just start!  Now!  Yes, I mean YOU.

~Keleigh

I was asked a great question this morning on how an organization empirically quantifies marketing results.  After all, how do you separate the people who would have bought your products and services without your advertising from those who showed up because of your advertising?  In short, you don’t.  But that doesn’t mean your efforts aren’t measurable!

The following link to a Microsoft Office article addresses the question of measuring Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) fairly well: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/create-a-results-oriented-marketing-plan-HA010060235.aspx?CTT=5&origin=HA010024376

Breaking it down

What ROMI is really about is establishing how the results of the investment will be quantified before engagement, then doing the work of making those measurements.

When establishing how results will be quantified, it is important to keep in mind that some results are short-term, some long-term, some direct and some indirect.  Keep in mind that, like medicine, marketing is part science, part R&D, and part art/instinct/creative.  Only engaging in activities that can be empirically quantified leaves many of the strongest tools out of your tool box.

However, by pre-determining how results will be measured, measuring each component of the overall marketing strategy individually, as well as part of the whole, a person can draw an impressively accurate view of what is working and what isn’t.

If you aren’t measuring what works and what doesn’t, you aren’t most likely wasting at least some of your marketing dollars and are far less likely to progress in building your brand.  The more you use ROMI as feedback and adjust your marketing plan accordingly, the stronger your cumulative effort becomes.  The more you ignore it and/or divert funds to projects that are not a part of the overall marketing strategy, the more you dilute the result of our efforts.

Marketing isn’t empirically defined, but it is definitely scientific.

Thanks to an unnamed City of Long Beach official for the question, which caused me to find a way to articulate what weighs heavy on my mind as we move into the 2011 budget season.

Guy Powell has a nice little Excel spreadsheet for calculating your ROMI hurdle rate: ROMI-hurdleratecal.xlt

John Jantsch is a marketing coach, award-winning social media publisher and the author of two best selling books- Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine. His following article is via OPEN FORUM

It’s not really enough to have a website. These days you must create a total web presence, but you’ve also got to create strategy based on overall objectives.

This is another way of saying unless your online activity ends in a sale you’ve failed in the game of online marketing. There are countless ways to fail on the quest to convert a pair of peering eyes into a paying client.

Below are just some of the assumptions online marketers make that prove deadly when it comes to successfully building trust and converting sales.

From Jean Aw, NOTCOT, via American Express OPEN FORUM:

If you’re like me, the personal and professional blend together in the social media world. By now, most of us are pretty practiced at living online. But there are still a few finer points that people miss when communicating online.

But before we get into those, don’t forget the super-important real world rules! You’re still interacting with people. Something an old lab professor told me when I asked what I was allowed to do in a certain precarious situation was “anything you’re OK seeing printed in the paper.” Keep this in mind with search and cacheing: nothing is ever really gone. Once you put it out there, odds are it can be easily found, again and again.

1. Offer something of value.

Before you put something out there publicly, ask yourself “Is this interesting? Is it useful?” If you can’t answer yes to at least one of those, reconsider. Whether it’s personal or business, you don’t want to spam and bore people. This doesn’t mean that you have to be brilliant all the time. It’s more about examining your motives. You should be moved to share because you think people will get something out of what you have to say, not because you’re trying to manipulate search results or be the next viral marketing sensation.

Are you using video to market your business?  If not, you’re going to be lost in a sea of search results and all the time, effort and money that you’ve put into your online marketing won’t be getting the return you were hoping for.

Why video?

• All the traffic is going to video. By 2013, 90 percent of all web traffic will be video.  To say that videos are an untapped marketing opportunity for small business would be a gross understatement.  As you’re reading this article, take a moment to go over to Google and search on a keyword for your industry.  If you don’t see videos at the top, then you have the opportunity to own that space.

• Google gives videos valuable real estate. Since Google purchased YouTube, they’ve given video’s some coveted top space in the search engines.  This means that more of your ideal customers will find you if you use video.

What kind of camera should I use?

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