Nigel Wilkinson
Managing Director of Daneswood. Nigel has been in sales and marketing since the 1980's and run digital marketing agencies since 2000.
One of the few good things about getting older is watching things that dropped out of fashion get reinvented for a modern audience. Watching flares come back into fashion for the umpteenth time, seeing youngsters in denim dungarees thinking they look so cool, whilst you are remembering Dexy’s Midnight Runners in 1982.
Reboot’s of films, covers of old songs by new artists (check out Brooke Combe’s version of the old Baccarat single “Yes Sir, I can Boogie”, or the DMA’s version of Cher’s “Believe.” Both amazing covers, better than the originals in my view!)
The same is true of marketing. Things get tried, work well for a while, become stale and cliché, then fade away. Of course, some things remain timeless classics, like “Price, Product, Placement and Promotion” or “Interest, Desire, Enthusiasm and Action” or Sean Connery’s suit in Goldfinger.
Well, Scorecard Marketing is one of those things that I haven’t seen for a while that is making a reappearance, with a fresh new twist for a modern audience. Let’s jump back in time 15 years and I’ll explain.
If you came to one of my seminars back in the day, near the end you would be given a piece of paper with the topics we had discussed. Website, SEO, Paid Search, Email Marketing, maybe even the hot new topic of social media!
You would then have been asked to score yourself on how well you thought you were doing on each and to circle those you thought were the most important to address.
This was a great way of getting prospects to highlight where they could improve their marketing performance and a clear indicator to us as to what services were of most interest. It proved a very effective tool for everyone involved. But like many things, it had it’s time, got stale, and we moved on and forgot all about it.
But like all great trends, Scorecards are back with a makeover. In the newest incarnation, it’s all online, via a nifty bit of software, and the applications are expanded. It can still be used for lead generation, but no longer do your prospects have to be sat in the room with you. You can send a link via email, or social media, or Ads, whatever you can think of!
What’s more, you can use them for more than just lead generation, you can also use them for onboarding clients, and even use them as a screening tool for recruitment, rather than the now often derided CV. (sure they will be back in fashion one day too!)
So here I am, creating Scorecards again like I was 15 years ago, but now with a nifty piece of software, easy to use drag and drop features and some great reporting interfaces. If you want to check one out, you can see ours here or please get in contact if you think Scorecard Marketing could work for you. In the meantime, I’ll be dusting off my pastel t-shirts and Miami Vice-style jackets with shoulder pads, just in case they make a comeback!