One of the great things about digital marketing is the ability to track and measure all your efforts across all channels and in immense detail. It is also one of the dangers.
Marketing leaders should be wary of a bottom-up approach to measurement, which could leave them with a skewed view of their efforts – often at the expense of business performance.
Looking at the power of measurement, marketing leaders can best use it to advance business goals.
Measurement is about incrementality. Measurement allows you to create incremental increases in sales, leads, in foot traffic and in brand awareness. In a nutshell, it’s about measuring your business performance.
Every organisation needs to have a single source of truth that is linked to their business objectives and team goals. Having said that, one of the biggest problems we are seeing is organisations which get lost in measurement. They lose sight of the bigger picture and the overarching goals, including the simple goal of reaching more people.
Taking a top down approach
Measurement needs to filter down throughout the organisation. It must start at a CEO level, then move down to a CMO level and then to the marketing team who will measure their efforts on a more detailed level.
Marketing leaders must remember that if they are not performing at the highest level, then the lower levels are irrelevant.
While there is definitely merit in the micro measurements, leaders must regularly lift up their heads and check in on their macro business objectives.
Asking the right questions
CMOs should be having frank conversations with their CEO. A simple, but important question: ‘What is it about the business that keeps you up at night?’ can make all the difference in ensuring you have the right metric to work with.
Once you have this you can make the extrapolations into long-term marketing goals, such as growing your base, and short-term goals like generating leads and boosting product sales.
It’s the simple questions that deliver the truest measurements. Asking questions like, how is your business doing creates the ultimate measurement.
Local companies still don’t use measurement properly
Working with global as well as local companies have given us a keen regional insight. In our experience, local companies have some way to go when it comes to effective measurement.
Most organisations are not effectively measuring their digital effort, and this is especially the case with the traditional companies who are moving from offline into the online space.
That said, we do see that some verticals like financial services are putting structures in place to focus on the right data and insights. Something that will also help them in terms of digital maturity as well as performance.
It’s what you do with it that counts
We believe that measurement is not just one level up to data visualisation and reporting. We believe measurement needs to be appropriately applied and that measurement needs to result in insight.
Once this is achieved, then marketing teams can move towards isolating trends. And it’s here that the real value to the business is seen.
Far too often we see clients obsessed with measurement but who stop at the reporting level, missing out on the real benefit of what measurement can bring.
If they hope to reach the next levels of insight and trends, companies will need to do more than just give a consultant access to their Google Analytics.
What we need is transparency of data and context of the business. This will help your digital marketing partner pick their way through the data and, when overlaid with the macro business objectives, find insight into your performance.
Companies must have the right technology in place, as well as the right people who are able to work with the data and make sense of it. If they don’t have the right internal staff, they must be sure they have the right partners who are digitally fluent who can interpret the measurement signals.
In conclusion
Leaders need to be sure to have the processes in place to act on the insights and trends generated by the measurement data.
In short, you need one source of truth, irrespective of the tech; you need to simplify the way you view the data and take a top-down approach; and you need to know how to move from measurement to insight.
Marketing leaders must remember that it’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of measurement. Taking a step back or working with external specialists can help deliver the perspective your business needs.
| Johan Walters | Lead | Tech Solutions Consultant | mail me | |
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| Andrew Smit | Head | Data Solutions | mail me | |
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| | Incubeta | | |
