Are you wasting your money? Do you even know it?

During the last week and a half, I have been talking a lot about analytics business. Truth is that many companies are wasting their money and even worse, they don't even know about it. World has changed and still, marketing communication is in many cases the very same it has been for the last twenty years.

Marketing officers spend most of their budgets for TV or print campaigns. Only a fraction goes online in Finland. Good customer experiences cross channels are very rare. Survey says that top management doesn't know how the marketing communication, or should I say customer dialogue, should and could be measured.

I warmly welcome the upcoming downturn. In some cases it means that budgets are decreasing. In many cases it means that companies want to know what is the return for euros invested. Wise people are willing to learn how to measure and optimize customer behaviour across channels.

I can assure you that it's not an easy task. Measuring only one channel or the last click doesn't make you happy yet. It's a start but it doesn't give you the big picture. If your main key performance indicator is click through rate, then you know you got it all wrong.

Be brave, be creative! Design your cross channel campaigns with the best possible outcomes in mind. Create a smooth user experience towards the goal. Test different messages, channels and call to actions constantly. Step out from your comfort zone where you have done things the same way many times before.

Next time when you are ready to spend some money stop for a while. Make sure you have the right people for measuring and analyzing from the start. I bet it's worthwhile to move some money from advertising to analyzing. Please care about the return for your company whatever your goals may be. When you have clear goals, then it's easy to define the right metrics.

End of one era - looking for the future

I got a phone call one week ago. CEOs get that kind of phone call sometimes. Saying that your services are not needed anymore. In my case, it means that seven year's journey with Naviatech has ended (last year company changed its name to NXC Finland).

I was in the company almost since day one, first as a sales director and then as a CEO. The company has had a steady growth although the business has changed a lot. Last year was the only one ending with negative profit, but otherwise the company has very good financial situation and it has the Strongest in Finland certificate.

First of all, I want to thank all those people in my team who have put up with me all these years! :) Sometimes we have had tough times but still, we have always managed to work our way through. I want to thank our customers and partners during these years as well. Thank you!

Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to say goodbye officially, but I hope that this message will reach you. I have had a priviledge to work with you in many different projects regarding to websites, mobile services, search and newsletter marketing, web analytics and social media.

I'm pretty sure that I will concentrate and specialize even more on measuring and analyzing marketing as a whole. I mean some day in the future. Now it's time to take a breath and relax a bit. Let's see what the future holds, I'm a free man! =)

Survey results: Challenges of measuring Internet marketing

I was speaking at Internet Marketing Conference this week in Helsinki. My presentation was about challenges of measuring Internet marketing. I did a small survey (in Finnish) before my presentation to get real opinions on this matter. Below you can see the results of this survey. Click any bar to see the percentages of each challenge.

This survey is based on the six key sectors of analytics maturity model by Stéphane Hamel (although I added couple points of my own). You can use his self assessment tool in order to evaluate your analytics maturity. Feel free to comment on these results or the challenges you may have.

Photos from eMetrics Stockholm 2011