Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2

Exploring marketing options other than using the poster idea is going to be an ongoing test of effectiveness versus cost.  As I mentioned before, a lot of seminars in 2006 spoke about using various mediums for marketing from adding purls to email and direct mail, to podcasting and SEOs.  However, no one has really mentioned how to track the budget.  We all know that these marketing techniques take a lot of money out of Marketing but it’s tough to pinpoint which one or combination of mediums actually bring in the most leads without sucking up the most money.  It could be plain luck such as depending on your target audience at the time or the latest hot marketing fad. 

Within Fuse, we are able to track our budgeting on how much we spend on the direct mail side with the purls.  We decided to build a feature into our platform that writes a Script allowing you to do custom reporting for any campaign that goes out of the system based on any set of variables in the campaign. 

Here is a great example of what I am talking about, we can filter out to a particular marketing department, in a certain state, in between specified dates, and see what their postage breakdown or campaign costs were.  We track by login so it could be various marketing or sales teams which may yield results to see what campaigns were the most effective.  Then corporate can determine if more money needs to be allocated during certain seasons, etc.  Unfortunately, that means that since we can only track budgets on direct mail with purls, we’re still not sure how to track budgets when you are linking your marketing through Google ad word searches or other means.

We are still experimenting with SEO’s ourselves and haven’t really gotten into podcasting but at least we have some of this covered.  We have some other cool budget allocation features as well such as allotting an extra $1000 to a particular login for doing well that quarter or allotting a percentage of a budget from multiple departments who are doing a joint campaign.  Would this cut out someone’s Finance time in half?  It’s one of those odd features where it may help tremendously but difficult to “sell” to Marketing since they’re not in Finance.  I wonder if this will become more of an issue as the industry catches up with all these mediums that take more and more money out of Marketing.