If a Facebook Like Falls in the Forest...

...but doesn't ultimately result in a sales lead, does it really matter? We don't think so. We hope this doesn't mean that we have to turn in our marketing merit badges. 

How many times have you stood in front of a CEO and watched her nod off as you talk about likes, loves, fans, emojis, and upvotes? They just don't care. They care about revenue and cash flow. Which means they care about generating sales leads. And once those start flowing in, they start badgering you, and rightly so, about doing that at the lowest possible cost.

Many of these CEOs are former top sales execs, and they know the sales funnel well - a certain number of cold calls leads to a certain number of face-to-face appointments leads to a certain number of trials. Multiply number of trials by your close rate and your average sales price, and that's your revenue. It's a very mathematical, disciplined model.

We think marketing needs a mathematical funnel, too. It's why we created the MRR (Measure-Refine-Repeat) Marketing Funnel©. We start with your financial targets and figure out how many net new customers you need. We divide by your close ratio to figure out how many offers you need to make. Then, we use data from Google Analytics ("GA") and Salesforce to determine what percent of your "contact us" form fills lead to an offer or trial. Finally, we use traditional analytical tools in Adwords, GA, and social platforms to determine how many clicks and impressions you require to get that number of "contact us" form fills.

Then we measure the hell out of the results (please see Exhibit A if you think we're just like every other agency that says that). The dirty little secret in marketing is that about half of marketing initiatives fail. We use data and our model to figure out what's working, and we do more of that. We kill the duds and move on.

Sound simple? Then why isn't your agency doing it?

It's not simple, because every social, CRM, VR, email, video, drone, and sharing platform sends different data using a different tag to Google Analytics. They define engagement, views, and impressions differently. Marketing measurement is a very disjointed, fragmented science. After much trial and error and about 20 years of working with mathematical marketing and sales optimization models, we developed the MRR Marketing Funnel© to deal with this thorny problem. It's our not-so-secret sauce, and it helps our clients drive bottom-line results every day. Please contact us to learn more.