If you aren’t implementing robust reporting tools into your marketing strategy, you could be doing your business a disservice. Real-time inventory management holds a wealth of information for numerous facets of your business, whether it’s product utilization, budgeting, or engagement. Let’s take a look at what measurements to focus on and what they can do for your business.
What Should You Measure?
What’s Tying Up Your Cash
Tracking what practices are tying up your cash will help you make the most of your budget. For example, products sitting on shelves for an extended period of time are dead revenue. These items haven’t moved off the shelves in a while, and because of this, you aren’t seeing revenue from them. It’s essential to manage the inventory on your shelves and know what the dollar amount tied to this inventory is.
If your business participates in events such as trade shows, it’s critical to know everything that goes into the cost of the event because it will help inform your strategy later. Factor in the cost of any materials you need for the event, such as the booth, tablecloth, brochures, banners, and giveaways. After the event, compare this to how many valid leads were netted from the event. If the lifetime revenue of the consumer doesn’t justify the event cost, you’ll know to alter your event budget to get a better ROI.
Level of Engagement
Analyze Google data feeds. Determine where people are going, what page they’re landing on, and what features on the website they’re engaging—and not engaging—with. This data can then be used to send outward-bound emails with promotional incentives to drive engagement with the product offering.
Utilization of Marketing Collateral
A robust storefront with customizable reporting capabilities will help you understand what products are being utilized, how, and when, which provides a lot of information that’s valuable for your budget and creative team. You’ll have information about what marketing collateral is working and how well it’s performing.
Providing your internal marketing team with templated materials will allow your creative and marketing teams to fully focus on strategy rather than small alterations and edits, driving more focus on outward marketing rather than servicing. Knowing your product utilization also provides visibility into what was utilized for the year to help appropriately build your budget and understand what gives the highest ROI.
Why are these measurements important?
All of these measurements work together to drive sales. It’s key to continuously improve upon your marketing strategy to see new engagement, an accurate budget, and most importantly, improved speed to market.
To continuously improve upon your strategy, take a look at your market and figure out what it needs. Following this, do an audit of your assets and talk with your sales team to learn what they need and what they’re finding out from consumers. Then, use this data to your advantage to optimize your strategy.
For example, if your market is requesting more personalized marketing collateral and access to these materials in the storefront, granting what the market is requesting can give your sales teams energy and increase their engagement.
A success story we’ve seen has involved one of our clients supporting their sales teams by offering a plethora of personalized marketing materials in their storefront. Their sales teams are able to access materials created just for them, and this results in high engagement.
Our client listened to their market, which was requesting more customizable materials. Then, they evaluated the types of marketing materials offered, which items were most utilized and why, and how this influenced sales. This information is continuously built upon to evaluate gaps in the marketing offering that can be automated and rolled out easily to thousands of people every year. The storefront and reporting capabilities are used in every way possible throughout every facet of the business to drive sales and budget better.
Implement the robust Reporting Tools You Need Today.
Real-time inventory management tools have a lot of value for your business. On top of creating an accurate budget, you’ll have visibility into what marketing collateral has the highest ROI and engages your sales representatives. Get in touch to learn what our robust reporting tool brandstash can do for your business.
