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I’m tired of hearing these accusations that I think “all marketing is bad.” Marketeers try to position my viewpoint as “bashing marketing” because then it’s easier to ignore my real point, which is that marketing should be limited to activities that can be measured quantitatively and objectively. And that viewpoint scares marketeers spitless, because if top management finally “gets it”, a lot of marketeers are going to get fired.

Far from thinking that “all marketing is bad,” I’m a big proponent of effective marketing.  However, before we can talk about effective marketing, we need to examine some basic business principles.  Otherwise, we’re not talking about the same thing.  Here four basic truths about business from my perspective:

1. Any business activity that can’t be measured quantitatively and objectively is a waste of resources.
2. The point of commerce is to generate profitable revenue, so all measurements should tie back to sales.
3. Everyone’s compensation should be tied to their ability to help sales generate profitable revenue.
4. Employees who object to being measured quantitatively and objectively are running a scam.

Does anyone disagree with these four principles?  If so, you’ve got no business in the business world.  By all means don’t bother reading the rest of this post, because you won’t understand it.

Now, for those of you still reading, it’s pretty obvious what defines effective marketing: activities that can be objectively and quantitatively measured that make it easier and quicker for sales to take place.

So, based on all the above, there are five marketing activities that are potentially effective:

• #1 Direct marketing. Whether snail-mail or email-based, direct marketing is completely measurable from top to bottom.   You know exactly what response you get, and exactly how many of those leads convert to customers.
• #2 Internet advertising. Because click-throughs can be measured, and the leads generated through those click-throughs can be tracked, you know exactly how effective your ads are, and what financial impact they’re having.
• #3 Lead generation events. Regardless of whether these events are in cyberspace or meat-space, you can track the leads and figure out the impact.  That allows you to winnow out events, like most trade shows, that cost too much.
• #4 Call-to-action advertising. Non-Internet advertising that has a specific call to action, like a discount code, phone number, or a coupon that’s unique to the ad, is measurable.  This is very different from “corporate goodness” ads.
• #5 Identifying qualified leads. There are a number of packages out there that troll through the Internet to gather data about individuals, job titles, firms, industries and news report that, when munged, produces a qualified prospect list.

This is not to say that every instance of these activities can generate a reasonable ROI.  But all of the five provide the necessary measurement to determine whether the activity is worth pursuing or whether it’s just a money-wasting marketing boondoggle.

By Geoffrey James
http://blogs.bnet.com/