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Adobe, 76% of survey respondents believed measuring marketing performance was
important, but only 29% felt that they were doing it well” (Lopresti, 2014, p. 6). Large
companies are understandably interested with the measurement of marketing
performance, as they want some "accountability” of the costs made by their marketing
departments.
Moreover, the innovation that leads to the use of digital marketing creates better
opportunities to measure the results of marketing efforts. But, this also causes greater
pressure to make offline, or say, traditional marketing efforts more measurable too. The
quest to measure ROI nowadays thus applies also on the non-digital and therefore less
quantifiable marketing resources, not only for SMEs, but also for larger companies.
Businesses feel the urge to use marketing as a means of investment that contributes to the
growth of their business, and they feel the need to make any (offline) marketing campaign
measurable both in cost and in return.
Each company shows great interest concerning the financial measures of marketing
performance not only because the marketing department is expensive, but also to make the
right decisions and to adjust the marketing strategy accordingly. (Chouliaras, Gazepis, &
Kargidis, 2015).
According to Van Biesbroeck, "a good marketing strategy ensures growth in SMEs" (Voka
Leuven, 2013). Indeed, there is a positive correlation between marketing and profit,
especially in a ‘weak economy’ (like, for instance, in Greece) (Chouliaras, Gazepis, &
Kargidis, 2015). The most important aspect of a company's success lies in its marketing,
according to a study in 1997, where 500 CEOs of the most developed US companies were
questioned about their strongest skills. The majority replied "marketing and sales”. (Lodisch
et al, 2001, in (Chouliaras, Gazepis, & Kargidis, 2015). Furthermore, a study of 40 venture
capitalists (capital enterprises) investing in more than 200 new companies, revealed that
"doing marketing" was evaluated as the most decisive action determining the success of a
company (Lodisch, Morgan & Kallianpur, 2001, in (Chouliaras, Gazepis, & Kargidis, 2015).
SMEs, unlike big companies, do not have the budgets, time, skills, or resources to search
and evaluate their marketing campaigns thoroughly. The goal of our research, therefore, is
to create guidelines for launching and measuring successful marketing campaigns for SMEs.
The present paper has two scopes. Firstly, we present an overview of the different sorts of
marketing campaigns used by SMEs, their effectiveness and the reason why SMEs choose to
use them. Secondly, we want to investigate if certain SMEs measure their ROI, and we try to
identify tools to efficiently measure ROI.
Current research
Our paper reports about three independent surveys. It involves (a) 13 explorative interviews
with experts in the field of marketing; followed by (b) 27 qualitative interviews conducted
with locally based SMEs (7 B2B, 5 B2C and 15 both B2B and B2C oriented) and (c) a
quantitative survey conducted with 181 Flemish SMEs (157 were B2B oriented).
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