When constructing your marketing campaign, it is critical to identify the four measures of marketing effectiveness in order to ascertain whether you are taking the proper measures to ensure that your product is successful. If you are able to do this, you will give your prospective product the best possible chance that it can have to do well in the market. The four measures of marketing effectiveness are: planning ahead and designing a response-attribution infrastructure to support all channels, creating control groups for a more-accurate measurement of campaign lift, defining relevant measurement metrics, and defining specific attribution rules by campaign, (Ewald, B.). In my viewpoint, the most important aspect of these four measures of marketing effectiveness is the creation of control groups that will dictate what your consumer preferences are. The reason that I say this is that a marketing campaign is nothing without interacting and asking their prospective customer what they in fact want. Without this, the product and its campaign runs the risk of not properly targeting the very consumer that the prospective product was designed for. When trying to ascertain what the least important factor of the marketing measures for marketing effectiveness, it is in my viewpoint, is the defining specific attribution rules by campaign. This is the part of the marketing measures that is time consuming and does not produce the same results for the time invested.
Control groups are pivotal to the marketing process if they are implemented correctly. In my view, this is the most important marketing measure because it essentially provides the agency with the data about the consumer’s actual opinions as expressed from their own mouths, (Hughes, A., 2016). This is important because the metric data statistics only go so far and where many marketing firms miss the buss is that they rely too much on statistics rather than engaging with the actual voices and opinions of their prospective consumers that could be potentially investing in their respective products, (Hughes, A., 2016). This is where the control groups are crucial to the organization and they get cut many times due to budgets; however, they are worth every penny of investment. Consumer opinion fosters innovation on marketing campaigns because it relates to real perspectives of real potential consumers. Firms are fools when they cut this part of the marketing process out and only stick to the mathematics.
In my viewpoint, making specific attribution rules by campaign is not effective. Where the real relevant factors of the marketing measures come in are from the measurement metrics and the control groups. The rules by specific attribution is just what I like to call “marketing busy work” because the devil or in the case, the valuable piece of information are in the metrics and the control groups. These two sources give the necessary information that is required to make a successful campaign and reach that target consumer that is going to invest in your product.
What is important about any marketing campaign is capturing the interests, desires, and opinions of your prospective consumers. This is what leads to engagement and sales. If your firm is too focused on hard data, you are missing the personal touch that is crucial to marketing success. In the budget crunch, this is often forgotten, which is why I stress the importance of control groups in the marketing process. Through using control groups and engaging with your target demographic, your firm will be able to understand, know, and appeal to your target consumer, which is what the science of marketing is all about. In the end, marketing is the study and process of how to sell and appeal to the consumer, which is why actually interacting with your consumer and not calculating about your consumer is absolutely crucial to meeting your target sales and consumer engagement. If your firm implements this strategy, you will see a dramatic change in how you relate to your target market and will see a great deal of increased sales figures as a result.
References
Ewald, B. (2009). Five Essential Strategies for Measuring Marketing Effectiveness. Marketing Profs. Retrieved from: http://www.marketingprofs.com/9/essential-strategies-measuring-marketing-effectiveness-krishnamurthy-ewald.asp/.
Hughes, A. (2016). The Importance of Control Group. Database Marketing Institute. Retrieved from: http://www.dbmarketing.com/2010/03/the-importance-of-control-group/.
