By Tim Redpath
(Tim Redpath heads up Train of Thoughts, working with clients on strategic marketing, campaigns and communications as well as trying to measure value from marketing budgets. He is an occasional lecturer at the Sprott School of Business and is vice chair of the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.)
Eighty-four percent of business professionals using social media don’t bother to measure its ROI, according to eMarketer. Almost half said they did not even know whether the social media tools they were using had ROI measurement capabilities.
To me, this is a sad indictment of marketing professionals like me. We have jumped in to play with some shiny new toys but are not taking the time to invest in proving their worth.
The whole point of marketing is to effect change – change in buying behaviour, change in knowledge, change in attitude. But if we can’t measure these changes, how can we know what has worked?
I am as guilty as the next marketing professional. I have architected many marketing programs over the years and been consumed with marketing, promotional and communication tools. Measurement has been based on criteria as varied as number of customers engaged, number of mail outs, column inches of media coverage and a general warm feeling. Barely a chart or a metric to be found.
Marketing’s budget gets hit hard in a downturn when it can’t prove that it adds value. Bluff and bluster buys you only so much time; eventually, in the words of Jerry Maguire’s client, you have to “Show me the money.”
Google AdWords has gifted marketing a remarkable measurement tool. If you can’t determine value from your Google spend, then you need to find another day job. Other tools, like some social media elements, are trickier. Sometimes you can fold them in to a broader measure of, say, aided-unaided brand awareness; sometimes it’s just plain tough. But it behoves us, as marketing professionals, to try and justify our budget.
Just because programs are hard to measure does not necessarily mean that we should not do them. White papers are great thought-leadership tools but not always easy to measure in terms of value. You can track the number of downloads off a web page, number given out at a trade show or number of mentions in media. None of these is perfect but they give a peripheral sense of value. For the cost of producing a white paper, they should be a no-brainer for most high-tech companies.
With that in mind I have a matrix that compares the cost of a program with how easy it is to measure value. National print ads with an easy call to action are an example of something you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on and easily drive a measure of value. Conversely, you can drop hundreds of thousands on a sponsorship program and be left judging long-term value on gut feel and experience.
Direct mail is always a favourite in the easy-to-do-and-easy-to prove-value quadrant, while brochures are hard to measure but not that expensive.
As marketing professionals, we have to justify ourselves and our budgets, all the time. Don’t worry about the brochures, pick the big ticket-big impact items first and work your way down the list. We have no excuse for not trying.
Technorati Tags: Measurement, social media
