Previously, we talked about how the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has evolved in recent years. One of the key changes discussed was that CMOs and marketing teams are now being asked to trace their various campaigns and initiatives directly to the company’s overall bottom line. The thing is, these efforts aren’t always easy to trace. So how do you go about determining whether your overall marketing plan has been successful or not?
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All Metrics Matter
It’s a fair assertion that some marketing metrics are seen as more important and meaningful than others.
Take the following metrics:
- Landing page views
- Leads generated from said landing page
Though understanding the conversion rate of the landing page is part of our focus, there’s more we want to know. We’re also interested in our ability to attract visitors to the landing page in the first place. In this case, pageviews and other quantifications that are often seen as “vanity metrics” are actually quite valuable. If your goal is to understand how your overall marketing efforts are panning out, you need to look at every piece of data available—and understand how each of these data points, when assessed in context, sheds light on a much bigger picture.
Understand the True Impact of Your Marketing Efforts
The goal of measuring your overall marketing performance isn’t to determine that you were successful; it’s to understand why you were (or weren’t) successful.
It may be that:
- You experienced gains after improving your marketing efforts, but you aren’t sure of the correlation
- You experienced gains despite not having changed all that much in your approach to marketing
- You experienced losses—but this was due to factors beyond your control
Take, for example, that Pepsi commercial featuring Kendall Jenner from a few years back.
While the ad led to bad publicity for Pepsi, the company’s stock actually went up after the ad was released. Even more surprising, Pepsi’s stock declined after pulling the ad. Moreover, the ad didn’t really harm Pepsi from a “numbers game” perspective, either. While the backlash was strong, only 25% of surveyed consumers said the ad had a lasting negative impact on their view of Pepsi’s brand overall.
The moral? The success of your marketing endeavors won’t always correlate to changes in your bottom line. A marketing initiative may fall flat, but your business can still grow as the campaign runs its course. Or, you might run a highly engaging campaign that your audience loves—but it could fail to increase revenues. By looking at the bigger picture from multiple angles, you’ll gain a more realistic idea of how your marketing efforts are faring.
Track Changes to Your Bottom Line
All this notwithstanding, your marketing efforts will impact your bottom line in some way or another. But, it’s important to keep in mind that your marketing initiatives don’t operate in a vacuum. With multi- and omnichannel customer journeys quickly becoming the norm, it can be difficult to determine the degree to which a certain aspect of your overall plan affected the bottom line.
Your aim is to get as granular as possible when mapping marketing performance data to your sales and revenue numbers. One way to go about doing this is to focus on your customers’ engagement metrics—and how changes in their engagement align with alterations to your bottom line. The Optimove team describes this process as customer value maximization modeling.
It involves:
- Segmenting customers into small groups, then digging further to uncover individual differences within these segments
- Tracking fluctuations in individual customer behavior and engagement over time, and mapping these changes to ongoing tweaks in your marketing initiatives
- Staying laser-focused on changes in your individual customers’ (and overall audience’s) LTV
Of course, any changes to your marketing approach will cause your expenditures to fluctuate. That said, you’ll also need to pay attention to changes in metrics such as cost per lead and per win, sales numbers, and your overall profit margin. In digging deeper into the value your individual customers bring to your business—and mapping their individual engagement histories to this value—you’ll gain a better idea of the impact your marketing efforts have on each person you serve.
This will allow you to move away from thinking about your marketing initiatives in terms of how they impact the “average” customer and leave you with a much more realistic set of data to assess your overall approach to marketing.
Look to the Future
Labeling your overall efforts as successful or unsuccessful discounts the possibility that anything can change tomorrow—for better or worse. So, while it’s important to know if your marketing plan has your company headed in the right or wrong direction, avoid categorizing your efforts as an abject success (or failure). Instead, measure the level of success you’re experiencing at the present moment, and compare this level to:
- Your brand’s past performance metrics
- Your past predictions as to where you’d be at this given moment
- Your current projections for the future
Your definition of “marketing success” will evolve over time. The more success you experience, the higher the bar should be raised. For example, let’s say you have a landing page that has been converting at a steady rate (say, 1%) over an extended period of time. After making a few improvements, the conversion rate jumps to 1.5%— which you maintain for months on end. While the initial increase is a sign that things are better than they were, as time goes on, a 1.5% conversion rate will become the norm—at which point the team will aim to make changes that lead to an even higher conversion rate down the line.
As trite as it may sound, the goalposts are always moving for your marketing team. The good news is that you don’t need to reach these goalposts for your marketing initiatives to lead to growth for your business. Rather, it’s all about continuously striving to improve the marketing efforts and overall game plan that will set you above your competitors—and enable your business to thrive well into the future.