Yesterday I wrote a post for marketing profs entitled, “Forget Social Media ROI, What About Marketing Accountability?” If you haven’t read it yet please do, here’s a brief snippet:
“There has been a lot of much needed discussion around social media ROI but I think this is just a small topic in the overall world of marketing accountability. Here are a few things for you to consider…
- A study by the CMO council found that LESS than 20% of top technology marketers surveyed had developed “meaningful, comprehensive measures and metrics for their marketing organizations.”
- 68% of marketers were unable to determine the ROI of their initiatives (according to the last major survey).”
I wanted to expand on my post a little bit and talk about the importance of creating objectives that you can tie metrics too. It’s easy to sit down with a marketing team and come up with a whole list of objectives but you have to be able to come up with metrics that you are going to use to measure your success for those objectives, if you don’t have metrics then how are you going to measure success? I think one of the problems with marketing today is that there are a lot of abstract objectives floating around that we don’t know how to measure. We’re all guilty of using them (include yours truly). Here examples of abstract objectives vs clearly defined objectives.
Abstract:
- We want to be the authority in X
Clearly defined:
- We want to increase the number of online conversations about our brand by 25%
Abstract:
- We want to improve our customer service
Clearly defined:
- We want to improve brand sentiment and customer satisfaction by 15%
Abstract:
- We want to increase revenue
Clearly defined
- We want to decrease the customer purchase cycle by 10%, increase the average transaction amount by 12%, and increase the amount of new customers by 15%
Do you see the difference between the objectives listed above? Essentially the abstract and clearly defined metrics are talking about the same thing but one is measurable and the other is not. Keep in mind that in order for you to measure these objectives your client or company has to have some sort of existing data to begin with. If you’re working with someone that doesn’t know what the customer satisfaction rate is or what the customer purchase cycle is, then how on earth are you going to increase it?
Make sense? What are your thoughts on this?
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