How can you prove you’re the best of the best? By being recognised with an industry award for excellence. (B2B Marketing told me to say that!)
On a serious note, because the awards are performance based and substantiation needs to be supplied in spades it’s a great way to evidence excellence. Of course, you need amazing campaign data to start with.
The good news is that the industry is weighted down with measurement techniques, technology and data; micro-analysing every step of the process and every activity to ensure we can demonstrate an outcome from the activities deployed. Add this to ongoing performance optimisation in pursuit of dashboards, with numbers that are moving ever upwards and costs ever downwards, and surely we have a tome’s worth of evidence that the campaigns we deploy are successful.
Of course, the question is: Is this really what success looks like?
Before I get to what we think all brands should be evidencing, I want to identify two other important challenges.
1. Integrated data
The trend of decoupling marketing practices into ever increasing, separately organised teams and activities has led to a serious challenge integrating data and proving success. Ownership, accountability and reporting of marketing activities have become more siloed campaign analysis incredibly difficult to robustly review.
2. What business leaders really want from their marketing
If you ask a CEO, they are clear what they want to achieve – growth in sales and value. If you then ask the same question to individuals in the campaign team, they have a different and diverse set of objectives.
CEOs are not interested in how many web visitors you have, the length of time they stay, the conversion rate from home page to product page, or even proving you have driven an uplift in MQLs. They’re seeking confirmation that the marketing budget is a contributor to growth and value – not just a cost.
However, B2B selling is considered a purchase and the purchase cycle can be months, in some cases years. That means proving meaningful success in terms of sales growth can be challenging – particularly if your brand is selling high value products and services.
There is a better way to prove a campaign’s worth beyond producing reports with an ocean of data points, particularly if the campaign doesn’t deliver immediate sales.
As an industry we need to do a better job of reconnecting ourselves with the customer journey and evaluate our performance in terms of customer outcomes, rather than what could be described as ‘unconnected’ marketing measures.
At Gravity, we have developed a method that measures and simplifies campaign success into three critical factors. For businesses to be successful they need to ensure their brand measures up across the three factors and that they are in balance with each other. We call it FAB – Fame Admiration and Belief.
Fame: By how much will the idea or activity deliver brand fame both in terms of market awareness and brand understanding?
Admiration: How does this activity improve consideration and strengthen customer sentiment towards the business?
Belief: How does the activity lead to an emotional commitment in the belief that the business is offering a superior proposition?
At Gravity, we use FAB as a strategic development process across everything we do, including applying a set of strategic measures evaluating the three factors against competitors. This approach gives a holistic view of a campaign’s performance across the entire customer journey. Business leaders need to know and track these factors to truly prove success.
