“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”
H James Harrington – author & international performance improvement guru
Given the scrutiny of numbers, metrics and KPIs within all organisations there has never been a more important time for you to begin to measure and understand the performance and impact of your marketing. By doing so you can identify what works, what could work better and what you should stop to ensure your marketing is being successful for your business.
Whether you are a business owner/ manager or employed to drive business for your organisation it is worth investing the time and brainpower in developing a measurement orientated approach. This will ensure you get the most out of your marketing resources (people, budgets, channels and creative) and help you demonstrate that your efforts are helping your business thrive.
Over the years we’ve seen many businesses and marketers invest heavily in carrying out and repeating creative activities but without being able to prove its value. Thus the question has always be raised about whether they’ve made the right choices and investment decisions.
So what’s the solution? In many cases simply planning ahead and identifying how you could go about tracking the impact of the activity (the metric you would put in place) before it starts. This allows you to think about what measurement actions you need to put in place before the activity commences e.g. UTM tracking on your digital ads, setting up events on Google Analytics or just recording how people heard about your current offer when you answer the phone call or talk to someone face to face.
So where should you start your measuring approach? What should you measure? Simply ask yourself these following questions?
Q1 – Does this metric help me make a decision
Q2 – When I view this metric does it help me understand how to get closer to my business goals?
Q3 – If you answer ‘No’ to both questions you are looking at a vanity metric and need to ignore it. Next repeat Q1 & Q2 to identify better metrics to monitor.
But why connect your data with insight?
A definition of insight is the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something.
Data by itself doesn’t always give the complete picture. In fact on its own it can give you the wrong impression as to the impact of your marketing efforts as they can be affected by other factors.
For example we are starting to see companies report a drop off in engagement on Facebook compared to previous months. At first glance you may think by looking at your data that this may be down to the quality of the content that you are posting. However on January 11th, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be changing its news feed algorithm to prioritise content from “friends, family and groups.” This means that people will see less public content like posts from businesses, brands and the media.
But connecting data with additional insight isn’t just a channel focus. Your marketing efforts can also be impacted by a host of other factors including:
- Changes to your customers situation, make-up or behaviours
- Changes to how you are perceived in the market
- Changes in your market position or operating environment
- Activities and behaviours of other businesses in your market
Using insight around these factors will further enable you to have a clearer idea of what is happening in your environment and the impact on your own marketing efforts e.g. traffic to your website, responses to your direct mail, email open rates, click through rates from your digital ads, volume of phone calls to the sales team etc.
By connecting and responding to your data and insight you will be able to begin to transform your marketing impact and ensure your business is successful.
Want to learn more?
We are running our next e-nexus Marketing Hub event on 20th April at the Brewhouse and Kitchen in Southbourne. During our three hour workshop we’ll show you how best to connect data with some of the latest marketing insight and creativity to boost your efforts & ROI. During the session we’ll focus on:
- The benefits of using data and insight to measure and monitor your marketing efforts
- Identifying what marketing data you have access to and how you can begin to fill your data gaps
- How you can turn your marketing data into meaningful insights for your business
- How you can combine your data and insights with your creative approach to engage more of your customers successfully
For further information and to book your place via Eventbrite visit:
