Let me ask a simple question
…what metric is the success of your brand measured against? Not the metric we use to judge our marketing, but rather, for the metric we use for the brand as a business. Most of us, in marketing
and advertising, probably cannot answer that question, or can give only a superficial answer, and that goes a long way in explaining a lot of the issues we face as an industry. To know what to measure
and how to measure, we first have to know why we are measuring something and the means of knowing what success actually looks like.
The start
of any marketing effort needs to start by tying that effort to a business goal. Not traffic, awareness, or even brand recall because those are marketing goals and not business goals a C-suite can
understand. Sales, revenue, market share, and growth over time are some, but are certainly not all, of the goals brands could be pursuing. At the end of the day these are the goals that our brands,
and our C-suites, are being judged against. These are the things our metrics show, first when they are influencing and then to show how they are influencing them.
advertisement
advertisement
The problem for marketers is all our metrics, and data analytics are designed to measure marketing goals, not business goals. Our metrics are largely built to simply count when
something happens, they do not, cannot, show WHY these events happen or what leads to them happening. One click is the same as every other click in our reports, despite the fact
that we know that not every click is the same, or equal to every other click. What our marketing metrics do not, and cannot ever, show is a casual relationship between the marketing metrics we track
and the ones the business cares about for one simple reason. We cannot show a causal relationship between our marketing efforts and what people actually do. For us to be able to show that first,
people themselves would need to know and be able to isolate their decisions about what they do down to a single event, or even a series of events. There is hope though in this situation, we do not
actually need a casual relationship, because strong correlation can be just as good for our purposes. This is especially true of connecting marketing results to business results.
Our brands have goals and things they need to achieve to remain brands. When we isolate our marketing results from our brand results, we make it harder for our brands to achieve their
goals while making our leadership more likely to ignore and sideline marketing when things get difficult. Help your brand by starting everything you do as a marketer by asking a simple question,
“What business goal am I trying to help with what I am doing?”
If you’re interested in submitting content for future editions, please reach out to our
Managing Editor, Barbie Romero at Barbie@MediaPost.com.