Talking about measurement of your marketing programs is something we have taken very seriously here on the blog, whether it was B2B social media ROI or using LinkedIn for B2B sales enablement. The key in most of these posts has been that ROI is not difficult to measure, as long as you put the work into making it happen. Well it is not always simply about the hard work, it can also be about being smart about the tools you choose to use. Fortunately those tools are something that my colleague John Repa is looking at nearly every day. A few months ago John brought in Act-On Software and we deployed it within our marketing team. Let me let Act-On tell you what they provide:
The Act-On Marketing Service gives you all the tools you need for your online marketing programs. Whether you are just getting started with e-mail marketing, forms and landing pages, or you are looking to upgrade your lead generation programs with advanced techniques like lead nurturing and lead scoring, the Act-On Marketing Service offers a straightforward way to get it done.
Act-On automates many of our marketing programs, but the one I want to focus on today is how Act-On helps us manage our webcasts and the measurement data they provide. One of the main reasons we chose Act-On was the fact that it sits perfectly in between SalesForce.com, WebEx and our own website:

Starting in Act-On we set up our webcasts, which are immediately implemented into our WebEx instance and allows us to quickly develop registration forms that we use in all of our promotions for the event. There is nothing really special about the forms themselves, but after you create the form the magic begins. Lets use our webcast held last week on IPv6 to tell the story.

After creating a form I have a basic URL that I can drive folks to use, but I can also generate additional URLs to the same form my hitting “More” and “Get Public URLs”:
I want to create a URL for use on Twitter:

I want to make a URL for organic LinkedIn (we use LinkedIn PPC as well, so good to differentiate):

And, because it is always good to test the next-gen networks impact on your marketing, make one for Google Buzz:

Ultimately, for this webcast, we created eight different URLs for different places we were going to promote the webcast and for the social networks URLs I converted to shortened versions. Why go to all the trouble? Take a look at the real-time report I pulled twenty-four hours after starting to promote the webcast:
Do you see what I see? Immediately I can see what is working in terms of promoting our webcast. This information allows me to make important decisions and devote resources to what will work best. In this case I can see quickly that email is going to be a critical component in this webcast, Twitter is making s strong push and the links in the sidebar of our website are decent. This is valuable information and particularly so after promoting the webcast for weeks and as we have data from more and more webcasts to create comparative analysis.
Amazing what a strong tool and a little extra work will do for you and your marketing measurement.
Next time we’ll look at how Act-On integrates into SalesForce.com so I can perfectly measure the impact our webcast had on sales.