Posts Tagged “Accountable Marketing”

Regular readers of the ’slice know that I frequently rant about the need for marketers to be more accountable.  Given the challenge of measuring the direct impact of PR, I could take the easy position that you should kill your PR program because you can’t measure it.  In the past year,  however, I’ve entered this debate in the unusual position of a defender of PR as a growth driver.  My experience in turning PR on and off in companies has shown me the lift (and drop) that comes from a well crafted program.

What?  Mr. Tangyslice is going to recommend investing in a program with limited direct measurement?   The answer is yes and here is my logic.

• Old media is not dead (yet). I know that the prognosis isn’t great for old media but the national TV nightly news still has millions of viewers and depending on your product or service, you may need all of those eyeballs.
• Traditional press still has online outlets to syndicate your content.
• PR is about telling your story.  Without editorial outreach you are missing a powerful way to get a third party to validate your message.
• It isn’t just about traditional media.  Social media is an important part of any integrated PR plan.
• Content is still king. A well formulated PR plan will generate fresh content for  all of your channels.  I know this is a very “push” view of the world, but sharing is one part of joining the social media discussions and there just isn’t that much new content out there these days.
• There are still many opinion makers in “old media”. Have you checked out the number of followers the “old media” reporters and news anchors have on Twitter?
• They still writing about you. Whether you formally participate or not, the press is still writing or talking about your space.  It is pretty much always better to be involved.
• If you have news.  If you have a new product or service, PR and word of mouth remain really powerful and leveraged ways to get the word out.
• PR is cost effective.  On a pure cost per impression basis, PR can be a really cheap way to get your message out.  The bigger question is whether or not you reach the right people with you message.

So how do you avoid falling into the accountability trap?

In a perfect world, we would all have spare budget to measure awareness before and after our campaigns.  Absent that, you can start with clear and measurable goals.  You probably have a sense of your baseline sales,  traffic and lead flow and can look at your lift from those levels.   Your referrer logs can tell you alot about your traffic sources.  And finally, look for those rare times when you get a big press hit and nothing else is going on.

OK, this is your chance to blast me.  Take your best shot.  Mr Accountable Marketing has let his guard down.  Anyone want to take the other side of this argument?

I’d like to share a story about a time when I thought I was measuring the right thing (but wasn’t).

I had decided that paid search was the right answer for my business.  Many of my competitors were buying keywords and there was plenty of traffic in the space.  The popular terms were bid up to the $2-3 dollar price range and based on my conversion assumptions, I thought I could get the customer acquisition cost tuned to the point where we would have a strongly positive ROI.

After about six weeks of adjusting bids, killing off bad ad creative, inserting new ads, and reorganizing ad groups, BINGO, the cost per customer landed within about 5% of my target.  Needless to say, I felt pretty good and was thinking it was time to “pour some gasoline on the fire” by making a big budget request.   It seemed like a sensible thing to do given the acquisition cost and conversions rate.

Before making the “big ask” for budget I decided to take one more look at the numbers.  I wanted to make sure these new sign ups would become productive long term customers.  My back-of-the-envelope estimates prior to the campaign had assumptions for the average revenue per customer.  The real data, however, showed that these customers yielded 75% less revenue than our “typical” customers, pushing this campaign into the red.  I was relieved to discover this before dropping  a large sum of money into this medium.

The moral of the story: make sure you are measuring the right things and they are connected to real results. In most businesses, activity-based measures like leads or traffic are directional indicators.  In the end, revenue and sales are what really matter.

So, what are you doing to connect your marketing activity to bottom line results?

I think marketing people get a bad rap and often think that accountability is the root cause.  Too often we use words like “brand building” to mask the fact that we can’t connect some of our activities with tangible results.

Here are some questions to assess how accountable you are as a marketer.

• Do you do everything you can to track the results of a program (ie coded URLs, special offers, etc)?
• Do you freely admit when a program was a complete bust even if all the data is not in?
• Do you create a back of the envelope estimate for the campaign before you start with the creative?
• Have you sensitivity tested your campaign assumptions based on past program results?
• Do you ruthlessly remove the worst performing programs from your budget each year?
• Are you always looking for something that can outperform your tried and true programs?
• Is your CFO an ally?
• Does your CEO offer you more budget if you can find positive ROI programs?
• Do you favor effective over creative?
• Do you have a bias toward measurable programs?

Did I miss any others? Let me know.