This challenge is exacerbated by marketing departments failing to show true measurable outcomes and how those affect the bottom line. Your CFO is likely to see value because your Facebook page has two thousand followers unless you can show him or her how that creates value for your business.
Fortunately, in today’s world measuring marketing impressions has never been easier. Clicks, visits, bounce rates and other metrics can be meticulously measured through analytics provided by sources such as Google. Customer engagement can be tracked through Hashtags and Shares. We have focus groups and surveys that can help us keep our fingers on the pulse of the public to measure how a campaign will be perceived before it ever hits the universal market. Today’s marketing campaigns can be measured in quantitative forms better and more than ever before.
Websites like Ted.com are great examples of seeing how quantifiable results impact business. In March 2016 there were over 2,400 TedTalks available and in 2012 over one billion views (Ted.com). The website has won seven Webby Awards, a Peabody Award and an OMMA Award for video sharing (Webbyawards.com, Ted.com). Social engagement is what Ted.com does best. Engagementlabs.com evaluated the quantitative results of the NCAA March Madness sponsors in 2016. By using their “eValue” analytics they evaluated how each brand performed during the playoffs. Northwestern Mutual upset giant Coca Cola by effectively marketing using the following:
- Leveraging their association with the March Madness tournament to expand their reach and catch the attention of tournament fans.
- Tying key brand messages to the tournament to stay top of mind for tournament viewers.
- Tapping into human emotion with motivational March Madness-related content to connect better with their audiences.
- Employing relevant hashtags to capture audience attention across various channels.
- Following the tournament in real-time to stay ahead of viewers who were staying updated via social. (engagementlabs.com)
This is a fun look at the overall impact of a marketing campaign. Here is the link to the article:
https://www.engagementlabs.com/media-madness-2016-the-evalue-social-media-bracket/
So what are some of the quantitative parameters marketers should evaluate? Forbes writer Jason DeMers’ 2014 article “10 Online Marketing Metrics You Need to be Measuring” gives a great overview of the criteria you should be evaluating for your website. DeMers discusses how Total Visits “will give you a “big picture” idea of how well your campaign is driving traffic” while New Sessions will tell you how many new visitors you have coming to your site and how many of them are returning. He goes on to talk about even deeper measurements like Channel Specific Traffic, Bounce Rate, Conversions and Close Rate. Taking an in depth look at all of these can help your team evaluate the effectiveness of your website. My team used these elements to determine we had too much interference keeping visitors from getting to the main page we wanted them to visit. We were able to evaluate where on the page visitors were leaving and therefore how we needed to better position our pages and buttons that led to a call to action.
Social media is a relative new world of marketing and strategic communication. As has been discussed ad nauseam, too many organizations base their success on social media simply by their number of followers. Well having 20,000 followers on Twitter does you no good if those followers aren’t engaged. You are basically like a teenage girl just trying to gather as many followers as possible in order to have the bragging rights of “I have a gazillion followers”. Yet, no one cares really what your organization has to say.
There is tons of material available to guide marketing professionals on what they should be evaluating in their social media campaigns. In evaluating parameters like Reach which incorporate followers but also take it a step further to look at the number of Likes and Views to see how many people are really paying attention to what you have to say. Then by going a step further and looking at Engagement you can see just how compelling your communications were. How many people shred, retweeted or commented on your organizations posts? Recently I wrote a personal blog about self-image and posted it really more for a couple of friends of mine who were really struggling with this issue. I was amazed at the engagement over this simple little blog that I thought only a couple of people would read. The page view is at close to 2,000 with tons of comments, likes and shares. Apparently, this topic resonated with a lot of women and even a couple of men. When you are developing social media campaigns professionally you have to evaluate how and how often you are truly engaging your audience. Are you posting the same boring topics your competitors are posting? Would you be compelled to like, comment or share your posts? As I write this blog I am putting together my business unit’s social media plan for 2017. I want to evaluate the how and why but I also need to set some quantitative goals and parameters in order to judge our success. I am evaluating our sales goals and business unit objectives in order to develop a campaign that can help support those goals and initiatives. BY developing our social media campaign with these objectives in mind, I can relay these parameters and the quantitative results back to leadership in order to show that marketing does play an important role in the business efforts and results and is there for more than just to make things look pretty.
Marketers can make campaigns look pretty, however if they fail to produce a desired action then they are pretty much like the Hope Diamond sitting in the Natural Museum of History in Washington, D.C.. It’s great to admire but can never be worn and put to use. So when developing marketing campaigns be sure you are looking at as many measurable results as possible. Create value in what you do and maybe just maybe someone will think you are worth diving in to save.
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