Are your marketing assets generating demand?

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are measurements that indicate the health of the business. We use them in dashboards to give status at a glance. As a continuation of my series of posts on Key Performance Indicators for Marketing, lets talk about measuring the effectiveness of Marketing assets and offers.

Marketing Offer Types for Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing

We invest a lot of our budget in creating them, we use them as bait for lead generation, educational fodder for lead nurturing campaigns, and ongoing loyalty marketing to our installed base. The assets we invest in generally include:

• Website pages
• Whitepapers
• Analyst reports
• Flash demos
• Data sheets and brochures
• Case studies, success stories
• Press Releases (maybe)
• Webcasts and podcasts
• Free trial offer
• Surveys
• Newsletters
• Training guides
• Best practices documents
• Online demo

To accurately report on them you will want to tag them with an "Offer Type", similar to the list I describe above. Next we need to decide the dimensions that we want to measure, some obvious, some perhaps not so obvious.

Measurements for marketing offer performance

1. Usage in a period of time
2. Form abandonment/completion rate by asset (if they have a form)
3. Age
4. Time to next interaction by prospects who registered for this offer

Usage is a no brainer. You will want to trend this out, and of course as you move the asset around on your website and offer it through other media, it will go up and down in popularity.

Age is important because too many asset choices on your website or in your delivery channel, will result in folks not finding the great assets and perhaps not choosing any asset at all. If you subscribe to the theory that too much choice results in less decisions to choose anything, read this article on the paradox of choice that throws doubt on that theory. Bottom line for me is that I would rather have 10 great offers, than hide the 10 in the middle of 40 mediocre offers.

I also have a fear that some assets are innoculating prospects. They read them, and never come back to your website. Hence the 4th metric, how long after an asset is downloaded until they interact with you again. This metric could help you weed out the weak offers by something other than usage and age.

There are a few other considerations in Asset performance measurement:

• Separate out "offers downloaded results" by net new leads versus existing prospects in your database versus installed base customers.
• Separate out proactive out reach of offers (email offers) from the results of folks finding your offers for themselves either on your website or through a third party.
• Your offers should have unique IDs so that they can be reused in multiple different programs/campaigns, and you can run the report based on the offer ID. If you change the form, fit, or function of the offer, give it a new ID.
• Also consider tracking all offers regardless if they have a gated form or not. This is an asset report, not a gated asset report! But in your reports you may want to highlight the difference.

What is the best KPI for Marketing offers?

So we have defined the types of offers, we have defined 4 dimensions of measurement, what would a single KPI for assets look like? We want a KPI that will set alarm bells going if it trends in the wrong direction, and we want that change to be obvious soon after it happens, not months later. Occam's razor tells us we should reach for the obvious one: look at total asset downloads per week or per month, and watch the trend. If you have 100 assets, at $3K each, isn't it worth keeping an eye on this $300K to see if it is working for you or against you?

-Kevin

Comments

[Drip Marketer]

Do you advocate the idea of charging for content like whitepapers or seminars, even if not for the revenue gain, but only to elevate the perceived value in the offer? Could reduce the number of leads, but qualify them better, too.

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