I rarely use this space to promote productive and even time- and cost-saving offerings from digital marketing suppliers, choosing instead to fill it with half-baked but amusing (I think) opinions on the state of Marketocracy or horror stories about bots. This week, however, in the interests of a quaint but noble journalistic aim called “reader service,” I make an exception. During a catch-up call with Patrick Tripp, product manager of Adobe Campaign (nee Neolane), I learned of a website his unit had just put up called the Campaign Management Self-Assessment Tool that offers what may be the best 20 minutes an inquisitive digital marketer can spend on the Web.
The program presents seven capability areas—among them customer knowledge, channels and execution, real-time engagement, and reporting and analytics—in which you are asked to gauge your performance in five categories. “We use or import predictive models to help reporting and targeting” and “We have fatigue rules in place to avoid reaching out to individuals too often” are the types of things you’re asked to rate your operation on.
Once that’s done, Adobe scores you from 1 to 5 in each of the seven general areas and each of the individual questions. Being the inventors of Photoshop, Adobe even present your results in a colorful pie chart benchmarked against five industry verticals. Before constructing the tool, the company surveyed 300 marketers across all the big verticals to assess their campaign proficiency. You the user can therefore be informed as to whether you are a beginner or a world class player in the game of digital campaign management. You can also match your results against any one of the different verticals.
“This can be used as a great team exercise. Getting your key people together and drilling into each question is a great way to set goals,” says Tripp, who then turns devious. “Of course, you can also use it to root out gaps in perception of your efforts among staff. Have them do the survey individually and see where they disagree.”
After all this effort, you have to fill out a form with your personal contact information to get your complete assessment and action points returned to you in a PDF report, sure to be followed by a call from an Adobe sales rep. (Something tells me Adobe probably aced its own test.) You know the drill. You do it yourself with your website visitors and white paper readers. So, when an Adobe rep calls you, just tell him or her that Al Urbanski told you that Patrick Tripp told him that you didn’t have to buy anything.
Unless, of course, your results so move you.
