In a recent Winning Online Podcast Paul and I introduced the idea of creating a specific type of balanced scorecard to judge the efficacy of your online marketing efforts. The Vende Digital marketing balanced scorecard consists of 4 quadrants. Three of the quadrants are used to define and measure progress toward the objectives stated in the 1st quadrant, the purpose quadrant. It’s this quadrant we’ll turn our attention to in this blog post. You can’t create an effective marketing balanced scorecard without knowing why your website exists. The Purpose quadrant defines your website terms of existence and as well as providing an overall goal for your marketing campaigns.
The Purpose Quadrant summarizes 2 key pieces of information: your website purpose and the objectives needed to fulfill that purpose.
Know your purpose !
So why do you have a website? Is it because your competitor’s do and you don’t want to be left out? Did your ego drive the decision? Why exactly are you online? Why do you spend all this money each month for a web presence?
Websites don’t exist without a purpose. Is yours designed to create more leads, sell more products, fulfill customer service, or create brand awareness?
The answers to these questions require heavy lifting and deep thought. Ultimately they tie must tie into your firm’s mission statement. Your mission statement answers three essential questions: who you are, what you do, and why you matter (why should someone spend their money with you rather than a competitor?). This purpose statement of your website helps to connect the dots between your web marketing efforts and the overall company mission. Ultimately your website needs to support the mission of your company. Does yours?
So here’s how we connect the dots from our company’s mission statement to the purpose quadrant of our marketing balanced scorecard.
- Our vision is to make a difference. This is why we exist. If we aren’t making a difference, then we need to shut the doors and go home. We make a difference in our client’s businesses, our employees, vendors, etc.
- Our mission answers the question “How” do we make a difference. The answer is our mission statement “Connecting customers to our clients.” If we aren’t connecting customers to our clients, then we cannot make a difference for them. Also, we need clients to connect customers too. Without clients, customers won’t be able to enjoy the benefits of their products/services. Without clients we can’t pay employees and vendors which means we can’t make a difference here either.
- Our website helps us find and vett clients. These clients help us fulfill our mission by allowing us to connect them to customers. When we connect customers to our clients we make a difference.
The purpose quadrant defines your online objectives within the scope of your mission statement. It’s here that you will define the purpose of your website and then quantify the macro objectives of the online marketing campaign. It needs to be succinct, one sentence (it has to fit in the box!), and understood by your team.
Why quarterly objectives?
We suggest quarterly objective (s) in order for them to be more frequently measured, reviewed, and refined if need be.
This quarterly objective will define the activities of the other 3 quadrants. You’ll measure progress towards this defined objective, and refine it on an ongoing basis.
Here’s an example of how we might create quarterly objectives. Let’s presume we want to add 10 new clients in 2015. We would like 60% to come from the web. Therefore the purpose of our website is to find/vett 6 new clients over the next 12 months. That’s 2.5 new clients per quarter. All our marketing activities will measured against meeting this goal of 10 new clients, 2.5 per quarter (yes, I don’t know what half a client looks like either!). The entire team knows the goal, and what we need to accomplish each quarter to stay on track to achieve this.
If you’ve exceeded the quarterly goal, we’ll look to raise adjust our goals higher for the following quarters. If you’ve failed to achieve it, you’ll examine the other 3 quadrants to determine what went wrong and why.
We use the marketing balanced scorecard here at Vende Digital as a tool to keep our marketing efforts on track and on a quota. It’s also a great visual to share with our team as well.
In our next couple of blog posts we’ll examine how your marketing balanced scorecard uncovers the “truths” of your online marketing efforts.
