In the world of B2B, measuring the effectiveness of our activity has sometimes been ignored or certainly relegated to an afterthought. The Institute of Practitioners (IPA) in Advertising has recently published its compendium of the 25 years of its Effectiveness Awards: Advertising works and how. Each year, the awards are made on the effectiveness of the campaigns judged by the metrics put in place to gauge success. From 1980 to 2004 its roll of honour of grand prix winners contains some memorable campaigns. Not one of them is from businesses marketing to other businesses.
Why is this? I don’t believe that B2B creativity is that lacking in relation to B2C; nor is it that most of the award winners are TV based and therefore not in B2B territory. I believe that not enough serious B2B campaigns have been subjected to the rigour of proper metrics to assess their effectiveness.
Are we in the B2B world really that bad at measuring the effectiveness of our work? And why should this be?
Firstly, of course, there is always the case that budgets often seem to preclude the use of expensive pre- and post-testing to properly measure advertising campaigns. When you are spending £250,000 on a campaign, you are more likely to want to spend it on doing it instead of measuring it. But if your budget is £2.5 million, you can easily find the odd £50,000 for the research to assess effectiveness.
Secondly, measurement usually requires a commitment of time as well as the cash resource. B2B marketing departments are often simply not big enough to set aside the time it takes.
Thirdly and this is probably the key to understanding why there are no B2B campaigns in the IPA’s effectiveness awards that despite the name change in 2002, the IPA awards are essentially for advertising. B2B campaigns have been much more likely to be concerned with a broader mix. And the broader mix has often included activities that are much easier to measure than advertising.
The measurement of response to direct marketing campaigns and the tracking of that response to sales has certainly been advocated by good B2B agencies. The test, refine and test approach is one that most ABBA members would recognise. In fact one of the criteria for continued ABBA membership is a standards assessment in which each agency has to present not only their work, but also the results and how they measured them. ABBA agencies have always paid considerable attention to ROI.
So what has happened in the B2B world is that we have been good at measuring the things that are easy to measure and not very persuasive with our clients in getting them to invest in measuring those things that are hard to measure. But new tools and techniques are arriving that will make metrics so much more accurate and so much more important.
It is becoming increasingly important to justify the marketing budget to the CEO, and leading companies are focusing on how to do this through accurate measurement of the results they are achieving.
Firstly, the most obvious shift in marketing behaviour is the new digital age. The old model of bombarding your audience with enough messages so that some of them stick is disintegrating. Messages are now refusable. Intrusive advertising has given way to engagement advertising that invites and rewards attention, and this shift is most salient in the world of digital or interactive marketing. What the digital age has given us is a veritable treasure trove of measurement. We can now know how many people have seen our online ad and we can assess the exact response because we understand exactly what they did as a result of seeing it. We also know which elements of our website work and which don’t. Furthermore, we can identify the leads and the direct sales that have resulted from hits on our site as well as where they came from. Digital campaigns are the nirvana of measuring effectiveness.
More techniques are around and can be employed to assess even more difficult activities. Neuroscience has for example, changed our assessment of how advertising works. The old AIDA model (attention, interest, desire, action) is largely outmoded and can be seen very much as the logical response of the brain to the limited number of brand messages it was receiving. We now know that the brain will process emotional and subliminal brand information beyond logical working memory. Brain scanning combined with traditional survey-based techniques are providing remarkable data, not only about the affect level of messages, but also the emotional response to them.
New quantitative brand research techniques such as brand tracking, brand reputation and brand permission can measure not only awareness and perceptions of a brand, but the propensity of customers and prospects to do business with the brand. So where we had assumed that the only test of the branding work we did was how aware our targets were of our brand now we can actually value their response.
In the world of B2B we need to keep up with all these developments and not assume they are just for the billion dollar brand managers at the likes of P&G.
I believe we have been good at measuring discrete, direct campaigns. We now need to use digital and all available techniques for our clients. Ultimately, we in the B2B agencies need to convince our clients to value our work. Measuring the value is the best way to achieve it.
