Business meeting: How to measure your B2B marketing campaigns

Measure your marketing meaningfully

First you couldn’t measure anything, now technology allows you to measure everything. James Myers, joint head of planning at Ogilvy, helps marketers make sense of their measurement woes

Most of the things we want to measure we can’t measure very well. And all the things we can measure aren’t necessarily that useful. For that matter, we can’t even measure absolute profit accurately, it is just a number based on several assumptions around depreciation and future flows; and as much as we talk about it we can’t actually measure engagement or even customer satisfaction, just proxies for it.

The trouble is we all get seduced by a nice succinct number in black and white that is ‘the answer’; we use spreadsheets the same way to show factual data. Too rarely does anyone ask how you actually calculated the information in it. And historically marketers have muddled along safe in the knowledge that the proxies we created were pretty good stabs at what we were trying to measure whether it be responses or awareness. Everyone loved a good old brand tracker even if someone tried to attribute the random blip to their team. As human beings we love narratives, and we don’t like randomness, or ‘it just happened’, ‘no idea’ type explanations.

However, digital technology is changing everything. It’s enabling the number obsessed among us to become even more vigilant. Now we can measure almost everything without knowing what it means, and that is a big problem.

So what’s a marketer to do? How can we create the narrative, the answer, out of all the seemingly random but sort of useful pieces of information that are now available to us?

1. Focus on your end goals

We find the biggest cause of inefficiency and confusion in the measurement protocols our clients adopt is the misalignment of objectives. The classic case is finance chasing margin, marketing chasing budget efficiency, field sales wanting quality leads and sales requiring lead volume. As we all know, trying to do all of this is the best way to miss all four targets. The business has 

to align its objectives and be clear about what it is trying to achieve, which is not necessarily a trite task.

To that point some agencies have created an approach to help clients identify the business ambition and KPIs aligned to the purchase cycle. The advantage of this type of approach is that if the purchase cycle is complex and lengthy it is clearer for all to see what type of interaction is required and the best way to measure it.

2. Make use of the buckets

You can’t pin yourself to one single metric. You have to outline how different metrics can enable you to identify success at each part of the sales funnel. Organise your data around your model of the funnel. Each stage of the funnel is effectively a bucket.

‘Bucketing’ statistics in this manner will help you begin to make sense of the data landscape. It will allow you to provide every interaction; clicks, tweets, likes, CTRs, with an ‘engagement value’. If a potential customer has clicked through and read a product review for example, you would give that action a higher value than a user liking a brand competition on Facebook.

3. Observations are not metrics

Of course you can learn lots from the measurement of data but don’t start using and publicising it until you know the information ladders up to your end objectives or that they really mean something. Treat them for exactly what they are – clues. Create hypotheses and test them. Here are three examples of things you could glean from a healthy and well managed measurement system:

• Channel attribution: put all of your measurement information in one place, whether digital advertising performance, direct mail response or number of print insertions. This will allow you to profile a 360-degree view on channel attribution. See how shifting advertising on different media channels affects awareness, engagement and conversion. Use this information to optimise your media mix and make every penny count.

• Segment by behaviour and interaction: once you have begun bucketing your metrics you will see the simplicity and value in having different measurement sets for your different target audiences, after all they do all behave differently.
You can attribute different success metrics per audience (highly sought after CEOs, for example, could have a higher value placed on a brand engagement, whereas an IT manager who already knows all about your tech company would have a higher value on a conversion). You can measure how engaging particular content is to a particular audience, therefore making your messaging more relevant while also improving performance
in real-time.

• Profile high-value customers and interactions: use measurement to find out who your audience actually are. With social campaigns, for example, you can measure the real demographic data of users that are most interested in your advertising. This can lead to interesting challenges to company pen portraits.
For example, we recently ran a campaign for a client and found that a large number of engagements were from women, when the pen-portrait assumed the decision-maker was 90 per cent likely to be a man. The ability to measure demand for your content in real-time can have a real influence on how you structure content and messaging to your target audiences.

In conclusion: less is more focused.

 

 

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