Smarketing: define goals, execute, measure, improve, repeat (or not)

As there are more tools introduce in the marketing world almsot weekly for on and offline marketing, it's important to remember that marketing is not just about execution for execution sake.  Marketing should drive:

• Awareness
• Leads
• Conversions 
• Business strategy 

And these are just the highlights.  To my first point, "marketing" can't just mearly be around executing on campaigns - if this were the case, marketing would be solely on guess, go.

As businesses continue to struggle (but knock on wood we're seeing some light with more VCs backing companies, acquisitions, and consumers in general getting confidence again), it's important to make sure that the time and money investments we're putting into marketing campaigns are well spent.  For example, doing a PPC campaign that yields100 new leads for $100,000, probably not the best use of spend ($1,000 per lead?  Whoa.)  Doing a joint webinar with a partner that yields 500 net new leads could be great.  If 90% of those leads are junk, though, was the webinar the best approach?  In drip campaigns doing drip emails is necessary and hugely effective.  If you notice that one email is yielding more opt outs than any other, might be time to change that email, eh?

I'll talk more about effective marketing programs.  For now, here are the Clif Notes around how to measure, what to measure, and what to do with the data: