Companies push to know marketing results right now

It’s no secret that things seem to be moving faster these days. As such, marketers are increasingly finding themselves responding to a retail mentality: Deliver the good solution, do it yesterday – but don’t sacrifice long-term strategic impact while delivering near-term results.

In other words, instant gratification within the scope of the bigger picture.

“Clients are looking toward making quarterly revenue goals and re-shifting their budgets based on those numbers,” says Mark Mylan, senior vice president of strategy for Hill, Holliday’s relationship marketing group. “They have to be strategic every day and manage each quarter as if it were the year itself.”

Agencies are responding by getting client offers to market faster and by building proactive and reactive strategies quickly. The challenge is to analyze what will sell in today’s market. “We have to go beyond past history because behaviors are changing so rapidly today,” Mylan says. “In order to do instant research and analysis, we take a sample size just large enough to allow us to see patterns of choices customers make, which helps us understand what drives consumer choices without actually having to first put offers into the marketplace.”

That’s the idea behind impactLab, Hill, Holliday’s proprietary process that helps clients prioritize the variables and learn, for example, whether a dollar-off offer is better than a premium or if a premium offer from one brand is better than a dollar-off offer from another. Consumer samplings for impactLab are taken via telephone interviews, Internet surveys and focus groups – all providing testing input for another proprietary tool, called the configurator.

The configurator runs marketplace simulations, which help determine the relative value of offers and exactly what to put into market as quickly as possible. “We used it most recently to power a direct mail program for one of our clients,” Mylan says. “The result was to generate incremental revenues that propelled them to end their quarter as a leader in their category.”

Direct is key to Hill, Holliday’s solutions for technology, manufacturing, retail and other clients at all points along the marketing continuum: brand awareness, purchase consideration, actual purchase behaviors. “We know who we’re targeting – the best of the best of our customers and prospects,” Mylan says. “Every client is trying to eke out whatever cost efficiencies it can achieve, and the beauty of direct mail is that it plays right into these budget considerations by delivering more awareness, consideration, purchasing/sales for what’s spent.”

Hill, Holliday believes long lead times are no longer acceptable to take a direct program to market. Companies have to determine how steps can be shortened or run parallel with each other, what research can be done concurrently with creative and what production can be front-loaded as early as possible with an eye toward numbers and speed.

“Direct mail must become more nimble and reactive as a channel, and focused as much on near-term revenue and sales delivery as it is on long-term relationship and loyalty objectives,” Mylan says.

That’s in keeping with today’s retail mentality: Be strategically tactical, which means being smart at the 30,000-foot level and at 10 feet.

“Marketing is never a static game,” Mylan says. “The moment the stimulant goes into the market, customers can say what they like or don’t like. Don’t wait for long-term tracking, but learn what is and is not working for long-term purposes by constantly analyzing data to drive improvement, innovations and sales.”