Marketing Performance

Marketing Performance Measurement Case Study

OBJECTIVE: Provide relevant and correlated marketing performance measurement intelligence to Agilent management for them to better understand and make adjustments to their corporate marketing mix in order to drive additional qualified leads and increase the sales level of high-end electronic test and measurement equipment.

BACKGROUND

Agilent is a FORTUNE 500 developer, manufacturer and marketer of electronic test and measurement equipment. The company is divided into multiple business units with multiple product categories and more than 30,000 products, global distribution and hundreds of online and offline marketing drivers, including pay-for-performance advertising, search engine optimization, catalogs, eMail, seminars and more.

CHALLENGE

Agilent desires to drive as much qualified buying traffic from all marketing drivers to its web site where online price quotes are given, with all sales handled offline through a field sales force.

"Because we're in a business-to-business environment selling capital equipment it's essential we understand how effectively we direct customers through all the online and offline stages of the (sales) funnel, culminating with an offline sale," according to Agilent Program Manager Teit Poulsen.

Agilent needed timely, relevant and actionable business intelligence to understand the value of each marketing driver, and that:

Helped evaluate the effectiveness of each specific marketing campaign and driver in fostering sales, analyzed and correlated by any combination of country, region, product category, product, campaign, activity, customer response, sales and more.

Detailed the effectiveness of the customers' online web experience in finding the products they need.

Created the ability to monitor their marketing mix and understand where to take corrective actions to better move customers through the sales funnel, get a price quotation and consummate a sale.

Correlate the offline sales activities of their field representatives with Agilent's multiple worldwide sales databases, tracking all activities, behaviors and revenues back to the events that influenced the customers' initial interest through to the final sales. The result would be a precise view into the success and return-on-investment of each marketing, web and sales effort.

SOLUTION

Agilent hired Viewmark to develop a marketing and business intelligence solution that integrated with their existing information infrastructure and tied together all online and offline events.

Viewmark developed the Viewmetrix toolset, a web-enabled system not limited by pre-defined parameters, but personalized by Agilent users to their needs based on their specific business interest. The Viewmetrix reports allowed Agilent to filter and correlate data by company-defined groupings, business units, product types, products, marketing drivers, geographic locations, date ranges and more.

All marketing drivers could be "weighted" for their contribution value to an ultimate sale; crediting events with the appropriate share of the overall effort. Viewmetrix allowed users to correlate and credit each marketing driver and customer touchpoint to specific stages in the sales funnel and their "weight" in driving the ultimate sale.

RESULTS

For the first time Agilent program managers were able to directly correlate revenue against online marketing expenses, web site user experiences, and offline marketing efforts, resulting in an unprecedented level of sales quotes with marketing expenses unchanged.

According to Poulsen, the result was "to improve the impact of our marketing and web efforts so we can create more orders and improve the amount of business we can generate at a certain investment level." "Viewmetrix has become the enabler for us to understand our business and processes better.