Marketing Operations Blog

We’re all keenly aware of just how different the sales world has become.

Customers control the sales process and as such are more demanding, informed and value-sensitive then they’ve ever been. To make things even more complicated, they have more choices than they’ve ever had making it increasingly difficult to wheel and deal in a competitive marketplace.

As a marketing operations lab we try hard to keep up with the technology options our clients can use to merchandise and promote their products or services.

Demands on those promotional tools, the most common being a website, usually extend to incorporate other business-processes the team wants to support. The goal for a company technology stack inevitably widens to more efficiently run their ongoing social media, sales, service and back-office operations.

So if Websites are the #1 category of technology we are asked about, I have to say that ecommerce is the particular flavor that raises the most questions. 

Why? Websites can be a powerful marketing tool to attract customers and the right ones can help support other business functions like sales programs, customer handling, and direct-to-customer transactions of ecommerce. So the software you choose matters.

First let me applaud you for taking the time to dive deeper into these topics within online marketing and operational efficiency.

It takes commitment to keep up on the newest solutions that may help, so SCORE and Measured Marketing Lab hope these workshops help to inform your business journey.

As we mention in the Western Mass SCORE workshop “Using Google to Grow Your Business” the materials being discussed are courtesy of Google, represent Google’s brand of tools, and most references to web-search assume the google.com search engine. But while Google is an incredibly powerful player in the online world, the “context” presented in class and detailed below is shared because we feel it’s important to emphasize that there is more involved in succeeding with modern marketing than just these Google’s offerings.

One of the biggest lead-killers on the web is having a slow website.

In 2009, a study by Forrester Research found that online shoppers expected pages to load in two seconds or fewer — and at three seconds, a large share abandon the site. Only three years earlier a similar Forrester study found the average expectations for page load times were four seconds or fewer.

How much of a difference can 1 extra second of load time mean? Ask Amazon.com. They ran a study in 2014 that found that one extra second of load time on their website would cost their company a total of $1.6 billion dollars, which even for a company as robust as Amazon isn’t just a simple rounding error.  

Marketing Operations pays its own way from increases in revenue or reductions in waste. We do this by making sure the budget is used effectively.

In the past, reporting on success of each marketing tactic consistently was a challenge. But now turnkey, low-cost solutions mean that any company will find it worthwhile to measure their marketing on a regular basis.

Google is a moving target making it hard to follow their trajectory. So here in Spring 2015 we thought we would take a stab at a very rough summary. You might be surprised by the variety of places where you'll find Google, but you'll soon see the common thread is YOU.  

Marketing, Sales and ServiceTechnology is a complicated thing. Learning how it likes to dance with everything else you’re already using is even harder. And that’s not even scratching the surface of trying to find out what technology you’re still missing and need to add. Sometimes it feels like it’s a full time job just to keep up with it all!

So today, we’re going to boil this down to your basic nuts and bolts and discuss the kinds of things out there that can help you get a better handle on your business and paint a clearer picture of the things you need to do offline to make it work better.

Almost every business is investing in their success with some form of promotion. And if these marketing tactics were retirement investments, you would expect a monthly statement reporting on the growth trends.

But for many business owners, measuring the success of a marketing investment can be overwhelming. That’s because unfiltered reports from tools like Google Analytics present an enormous amount of information. There is so much data it can be hard to separate meaningful insights from empty statistics.

In this article we’ll summarize how to select the single most important item to monitor in each of three core areas of marketing. With just a few metrics you can keep tabs on the payback from your marketing investment and sleep well knowing you have a finger the pulse of your business.