Over the past nine months, a public relations campaign for one of our clients generated an average of 11 media hits per month. This included coverage in a host of top tier business media outlets, such as Fortune, Forbes, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Washington Post, CNN.com, Inc. and Fast Company, as well as other major metro newspapers from coast to coast.

At a glance, no one would argue that coverage in these media outlets would be anything but impressive for a small company. And it is easy to assume that the sheer volume of high quality media placements would automatically qualify the program as a success.

But this brings us back to the question posed at the start of this article. How does your organization measure the effectiveness of its marketing and communications programs?

This particular client for whom we achieved such consistent and prominent PR success wanted its PR efforts to pursue a simple goal in 2005: raise awareness of the company and its capabilities, which was accomplished in spades.

Whether you are measuring media impressions, doing an advertising equivalency comparison, monitoring website traffic, or are able to go as deep as sales lead tracking, the ultimate grade you give your marketing programs will not be valuable unless you link measurement to your marketing and sales objectives.

And what do you do if your budget may not allow for the time it will take to implement these marketing measures? Without effective measurement, your campaign efforts may fall short.

And therein lays the rub on marketing measurement. It is difficult to achieve alignment and integration with an organization’s sales and marketing goals unless you begin with agreement on what will be measured and how it will be measured. And once that is done, even more important is to decide what is valued.

Measurement is a strategic decision that needs to be made before you execute, as it allows you to integrate all your organization’s marketing activities, and enables you to track the success of all activities against a central objective.

Does this sound like too much work? Are you saying to yourself that your organization already has processes in place to effectively pursue sales leads generated from your marketing activities?

Well, depending on the market you serve, you may find that a good marketing measurement program has become an economic necessity. Richard Vancil, vice president for industry analyst IDC Research's CMO Advisory Practice, while speaking at his firm’s Marketing Performance Measurement Summit two weeks ago, noted that marketing costs have risen faster than worldwide IT industry growth (6.5 percent vs. 5.5 percent), while sales costs have increased and sales cycles have lengthened. At the same time, the choice of media able to reach these customers and prospects has fragmented, further complicating marketing decision-making.

By incorporating measurement tools that are integrated with your sales and marketing objectives, your organization will achieve something rather innovative, and you may even ensure your own survival in the process.

We will continue to write about marketing measurement throughout the coming months, as the issue is central to our own value proposition and a growing passion. We welcome your thoughts on the topic as well.