Research: A Reliable and Robust Marketing Metric
Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
Without conducting research, measuring a marketing campaign’s impact in the marketplace can be difficult at best. Certainly, you can count the number of business reply cards, landing page forms, and phone calls that a campaign generates. But, while important, lead counting doesn’t begin to tell the whole story of whether or not an integrated marketing campaign is moving the needle on the brand meter. Even worse, boiling campaign results down to a lead count encourages those in the executive suite to view marketing as a sales support expense rather than a strategic market development investment. Such a view doesn’t respect the fact that it takes time, money, and diligence to establish a brand position; build brand awareness and acceptance; and then convert that into loyalty and sales.
Attitude, Awareness and Usage (AA&U) studies provide a comprehensive assessment of a campaign’s impact. This type of research measures a company’s awareness levels, explores the market’s perceptions of and attitudes about that company and its offerings, and helps assess the company’s strengths and weaknesses relative to the competition. As a result, more than any other measurement tool, AA&U studies take into account the holistic effect of integrated marketing—including messages and content put forth in difficult-to-measure tactics such as branding ads, press coverage, speaking engagements, case studies, white papers, newsletters, webinars, road shows, and so forth. This in turn helps the company make the next campaign more relevant and compelling to the market.
In order to be useful, AA&U studies require an ongoing commitment. At the very least, you need to conduct a study prior to a campaign in order to establish a reliable baseline against which you can compare results of a post-campaign study. However, Market Connections often recommends that clients include AA&U studies in their budgets every year, regardless of whether they change their campaign approach as often. That’s the best way to measure the impact of an integrated campaign, make the next one even better, and ensure that your marketing budget grows rather than shrinks.
