8 Thoughts on Thought Leadership

May 18, 2016 By Rick Shea

Introduction

This month’s post was inspired by a conversation with my physiotherapist regarding content marketing and what constitutes good thought leadership. I have my point of view; what’s yours?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

I have a torn rotator cuff in my left shoulder. Apparently, I’m not alone. I’ve read that by the age of 60, nearly 80% of us will have some degree of a rotator cuff tear. Perhaps our shoulders are not meant to do what we make them do!

At the frequent physio sessions where my ex-rugby playing physiotherapist tortures me to build up my shoulder muscles, we have plenty of time to talk. One recent conversation turned to content marketing and thought leadership, something we both do in support of our business development efforts.

There are many good reasons to create your own content. If you engage in content marketing, it’s likely that you do this primarily to achieve a position of thought leadership in your industry, and ultimately to drive revenue growth.

One reason to create content is to be perceived by your target market as a thought leader, but that doesn’t make it easy to do well. Over the years, I’ve written many thought leadership pieces for my employer, my clients and my own consultancy. That repetitive exercising of my writing muscles has helped me to develop my skills and also a point of view on the principles that underpin good thought leadership content. I’ll share eight of these principles below.

1. Strategy First

Strategy should always lead tactics. Thought leadership, like all marketing communications, should be guided by your marketing plan and content strategy. Identify the differentiating characteristics of your brand, how you wish to position it to your target market segments, and the key messages you will hammer home repeatedly through your thought leadership efforts. Be clear on such things before you start developing content.

2. Stand Somewhere

Take a stand, not just anywhere but somewhere quite deliberate. Stand in a place you know well, with a credible point of view. Stand in alignment with your strategic objectives, with messaging that resonates with your target market.

3. Stand Somewhere Different

Stand somewhere that differentiates you from the pack, like that one bird in the image below standing on two legs. Stand so you can be noticed and remembered for your differences. It is hard to be a thought leader by standing where everybody else is standing. Thought followers get lost in the crowd, in a sea of voices with safe and similar messages. Thought leaders provoke thought and discussion, often by being different.

Can you spot the thought leader? Hint, it's the only one standing on two legs!

Can you spot the thought leader? Hint, it’s the only one standing on two legs!

4. Create, Don’t Regurgitate

One approach to content marketing is to curate and share the thoughts of others. While that is a way to provide useful information to your target market, true thought leadership comes from creating content you own, featuring your unique and valuable perspective and insights. You will add the most value to the conversation and to your target audience when you create rather than regurgitate.

5. Be Yourself, Be Authentic

Be true to yourself and your brand. Your point of view needs to be authentic. Be the type of thought leader that comes naturally. Are you an innovator? Do you challenge conventional thinking? Do you make sense of chaos? Are you humourous, serious or quirky? Speak your truth. Say what you believe, in your own voice. Let your personality shine through to help engage your readers.

6. Be Engaging

Your audience is busy. If you want them to consume your content, you have to engage them. Tell stories and think in terms of a narrative that runs through your content. Try to entertain in a way that comes naturally. Let a bit of yourself into your content. Help your readers to see themselves in your stories and connect to your content. The more they can identify with you and your stories, the more they’ll want to consume and share your content.

7. Help, Don’t Pitch

This is a big one. Your audience wants to learn. They don’t want to hear your pitch. Help them solve their problems. Trust your audience to ask for your pitch once they’ve learned to trust you through the thoughts you share in your content. Focus on helping your audience rather than trying to persuade them to buy from you. Your audience will value and share relevant and helpful content long before they share your pitch.

8. Keep It Coming

Strive to be more of a hit machine than a one hit wonder; more Beatles, Bowie or Beyonce than Brooklyn Bridge, Bobby Bloom or Blues Image. One great piece may get you some attention but before long, you’ll fall off the playlist. Keep cranking out the hits. You’ll reach a wider audience and be harder to forget.

In Closing…

Whether for my shoulder muscles or writing muscles, regular exercise is key. We can do the exercise on our own, or get expert help. Either way, it is important to have and follow a plan. If you don’t want to shoulder the exercise load on your own, seek out help both inside and outside of your organization.

I’ve found it useful to follow the above principles when creating thought leadership content and hope that you will, too. I’ll leave you with three questions and welcome your replies:

  1. Which of these eight principles do you find most important and why?
  2. Which principles would you add to this list?
  3. What are your favourite one-hit wonders?
Filed Under: Approach Tagged With: content, Content Marketing, Effectiveness, marketing, Marketing Plan, marketing planning, Strategy, Thought Leadership

A Note of Caution

October 30, 2014 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment


Introduction

I had an interesting experience at the bank the other day so I thought I’d tell you about it. I was a little worried about what might happen at the bank, just as you might worry about deciding which marketing programs to execute.

It turned out that I had nothing to worry about and if you measure your marketing, and follow my five measurement principles, you can ease your worries, too!

_______________________________________________________________________________________

 

As I handed the bank teller my carefully crafted note, I worried about how things were going to turn out. I had taken a cautious approach with my note, but I couldn’t control or anticipate the teller’s reaction.

Normally, notes handed to bank tellers might say something like “This is a hold-up” or “Put all the money in a bag” or in Woody Allen’s case, “Abt natural, I’m pointing a gub at you”. My circumstances were different, so I needed a different approach.

For one thing, I actually wanted to GIVE the bank some money. Well, not exactly “give”. I wanted to deposit a cheque from one of my clients into my business account. The other circumstance at play was that I couldn’t speak, not one word.

Before you start thinking that I bank at one of those new all silent branches, allow me to explain by sharing the content of my note:

“I’m sorry; I can’t speak temporarily while I recover from vocal cord surgery. I’d like to deposit this cheque into my account.”

Thankfully, the teller didn’t panic, the deposit went smoothly and I escaped the bank silently, without speaking a word to anyone.

It is natural to worry about taking actions or making decisions with uncertain outcomes. It is also natural to want better information to help us make better choices.

Marketers face difficult decisions and a lot of uncertainty every time they have to choose which programs to fund in their efforts to attract and acquire customers. In the absence of data or evidence of how similar programs might have performed in the past, such spending decisions become significantly more difficult.

To improve your ability to make good marketing spending decisions, you need good data about the performance of past marketing programs. The purpose of marketing measurement is to support making better marketing spending decisions.

There are many ways to approach marketing measurement. Whatever approach you take, be sure to follow these:

Five Marketing Measurement Principles

1. Pick & Stick: Choose one measurement methodology, apply it consistently across all programs and stick with it. Without measurement consistency, you end up with silos of data around each program that are difficult to analyze and compare.

2. Set Good Objectives: You’ll need to measure your results against your objectives. Integrate measurement into your marketing planning to force setting well-defined and measurable marketing objectives, for the overall organization, the brand and for each program.

3. Involve the Right People: Measurement works best when you have input and support from other parts of the organization. You will need other key individuals to agree that your approach is sound and that the results of your measurement efforts are meaningful. You may also need them to provide you with good data.

4. Use Good Data: Whether you use a complex and sophisticated methodology, or a scorecard, it won’t matter how good your approach is if your data is garbage. Be hard on the quality and reliability of your data to properly support your measurement methodology.

5. Compare & Learn: To learn what works and what doesn’t, and to find the best ways to spend your budget, you need to compare results to objectives and programs to each other. Seek answers to questions like:

  • Did we get the results we wanted for the company, for the brand and for the program?
  • Which of our programs, and in general which types of programs, seem to be the most and least effective at delivering the results we need to meet our business objectives?

When I handed my note to the teller, I was worried about startling or upsetting her and hoped I wouldn’t need to engage in any further communication beyond a nod, a smile or a thumbs up. When you have to decide how to allocate your marketing budget, your worries relate to serious things like meeting business objectives, achieving personal performance goals and advancing your career.

To worry less and to improve your marketing decisions, make sure you have a solid approach to measuring your marketing. It will give you better information about what works and what doesn’t, your decisions will improve and the business results will follow.

As for me, I’m glad I didn’t end up like Woody Allen’s character Virgil Starkwell in ‘Take the Money and Run’!


Filed Under: Approach Tagged With: Data, Effectiveness, Management, marketing, Measure, measurement, objectives, scorecard

When I Paint My Masterpiece

August 21, 2014 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment


Introduction

Have you ever procrastinated? That’s what I thought. Me neither. Well, this post is about how one of the reasons for procrastinating really isn’t a good one (the others are fine) and how a simple strategy to deal with that reason will help you take on that project you’ve been putting off, like painting your house, or measuring your marketing.

_______________________________________________________________________________________


In last month’s post, I joked about how I was going to need to steal time from one “fun” project, painting my front porch, so I could take on another marginally work-related project that was really more about me having fun. Well, guess what? Since I last wrote you, I found time to paint the porch!

I have to admit that I had been procrastinating (just this one time) about my hellish little chore. I knew it was going to be ugly. I’d look at the front of my house and all I could see was the toil and sweat awaiting me. I also knew that I would need a big block of time that I could never seem to find.

Then one day, a simple insight about that big block of time got me unstuck and into motion on my dreaded painting project. I realized that I could break down this miserable undertaking into manageable bite-sized pieces. I identified all the steps involved and did them, one at a time, in smaller chunks of time, as my schedule permitted. Looking at the problem this way made it easier for me to get started, and easier to see the path to the end.

One of the reasons that some marketers don’t measure at all, or not as well as they’d like, is that the whole project seems like too much to take on. Like my house-painting project, you can make implementing a measurement system seem less daunting by breaking it down into smaller steps. In short, it requires a plan, and here’s an approach to get you moving.

8-Step Plan to Measure Marketing

  1. Assemble Your Measurement Team: It is generally wise to create a small and diverse team that pulls members from some combination of marketing, sales, operations, finance, accounting, IT, customer service, and perhaps some external resources. Marketing exists to incent profitable customer behaviour. People from each of these areas will either have a perspective on what that means and what you should measure, or can provide the data you’ll need to measure whether marketing is achieving its objectives.

  2. Decide What to Measure: This key step requires having clarity about your overall business and marketing objectives, as well as each individual marketing program’s objectives. Well-defined objectives from your marketing planning process will help you to identify the metrics that you’ll use to assess how well your marketing is working. You’ll also identify the data you’ll need to collect, along with where, when and how you’ll collect it.

  3. Pick a Methodology: You need a measurement methodology that you can apply consistently across a diverse range of programs. The methodology needs to accommodate differences due to programs of varying complexity, targeting different customers, with different objectives and that require different metrics to assess performance. A consistent methodology across programs makes it possible to rank programs by a common overall program performance metric.

  4. Assign Responsibilities, Set Deadlines & Expectations: Make sure each team member clearly understands their role and responsibilities, what they’re supposed to do and when, and who else on the team they need to work with on specific tasks. Like any project, your success will depend on how well people perform.

  5. Test: Start small. Measure one program while you develop and work out the kinks in your process. Pick a program that will involve everyone on the team and that will test all aspects of your process.

  6. Review & Adjust Your Process: Things may not go entirely smoothly on your first attempt. Check back in with the team, fix what needs fixing, and prepare to roll out your process.

  7. Roll Out: You may need to do this in phases, perhaps to other brands, other program types, other divisions and other locations. Do it in manageable steps and be sure to pause between phases to review and adjust, as needed, until you’ve fully rolled out.

  8. Review & Adjust Your Marketing: Hold a measurement review session before starting your next round of marketing planning. Take the time to see what you’ve learned about which programs have been the most and least effective at meeting their objectives, so you can optimize your next wave of strategies, tactics and outcomes.

With all the hard work behind me, I find it interesting how the disdain I felt for this project before and while doing it has somehow vanished. All I feel now is the pride and satisfaction of a well-painted front porch. The key was finding a way to look at the project that made it seem doable and enabled me to get started.

If developing and implementing a marketing measurement process in your organization is something you’ve been dreading, a step-by-step plan will make it easier for you to start and finish. Now that I’ve finished painting my masterpiece, let me know if you need help with your project!


Filed Under: Approach, objectives Tagged With: Effectiveness, Management, marketing, Measure, measurement, Measurement Plan, Planning

A Chapter About Bruce

July 17, 2014 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment


Introduction

Are the objectives for your marketing programs really just reasons without numbers? Well, with some inspiration from a seed planted by a song I first heard in 1975, I’ll try to help you to fix that problem.

_______________________________________________________________________________________


I’m a long-time Bruce Springsteen fan. My affliction set in the first time I heard Born to Run played on my local FM station. I remember it well. It was the fall of 1975 and I was sitting in the basement of our family home, pretending to do homework.

When I decided several years ago to learn about blogging, I wanted to do so outside of my work world. I chose to blog about Bruce as I had studied him more diligently.

The blog was fun, I learned what I needed to know, but after five years of weekly posts, I lost the enthusiasm to keep going. I stopped posting at the end of 2012, although I have kept the blog site up. I’m happy I did it and the blog opened doors for me that I never anticipated.

Recently, a new door cracked open. I’ve been asked to consider writing a chapter in a book about Bruce that one day will hopefully be published. The asker found me through my blog.

I haven’t made my decision yet but I’m thinking about it and why I might like to do this. That leads me to the point of this story. I want to illustrate the difference between having reasons for doing something and setting proper objectives for doing that something.

Reasons may give you purpose, but proper objectives give you the ability to measure whether you achieved what you set out to accomplish. To measure whether marketing programs achieve their purpose, you need to be able to compare results to objectives.

I have to decide whether to commit my resources to writing this chapter, in the hopes it will be accepted and published. Similarly, you have to decide whether to support and run specific marketing programs, in the hopes they will move your business forward.

Setting Clear Objectives Will Help Us Both

My Decision

Let’s start by looking at my reasons for wanting to do this:

  • Become a published author
  • Improve my writing skills
  • Reach a new audience
  • Have some fun

I think these are good reasons to do it, but they are just that, reasons. To convert them to measurable objectives, I need to challenge them as much as your boss (not that Springsteen guy) would challenge any of your marketing program objectives with some of those “what do you mean by that?” type of questions. More on that later.

By quantifying the outcomes I’d like for each reason, we can begin to find the semblance of a measurable objective:

Become a published author: This is the easiest one. If the book is published and my chapter makes the cut, then mission accomplished. I have to admit, this is my number one objective, and the one I’d weight highest on my scorecard.

Improve my writing skills: Now it gets tougher. How do I measure the change in my writing skills from before until after I write that chapter? I could assemble a panel of writing experts and have them develop a scoring methodology to evaluate my before writing, perhaps a few of my newsletters. They would then have to use the same methodology to evaluate my completed chapter. The difference between the two scores would be my improvement. I could set my objective at a 10% improvement.

Reach a new audience: I need to start by being more specific about who I’m trying to reach. If I want to reach Springsteen fanatics to draw traffic to my dormant blog, my objective could be to increase average weekly unique site visitors by 20%.

If I want my chapter about Bruce to attract prospective clients for Optiv8 Consulting, then I need to define how much new business I’d like to acquire this way. I’ll set the bar for number of clients at one, which is likely overly optimistic. The dollar value objective for that one engagement will remain a confidential matter between my new Springsteen-loving marketer friend and myself. I’ve met many Springsteen-loving marketers over the years so, who knows, this might work!

Have some fun: This one is tough. I’ll know if I’m having fun when I’m doing it, but what could I possibly use as a Key Performance Indicator for my fun? I’m open to any suggestions you’d like to make but I know one thing. I’ll be wearing a massive grin the day my copy of that book arrives and I see my name in the book.

Your Decisions

Since I don’t know which program(s) you’re contemplating running, or what your objectives might be, I’ll suggest a few things for you to consider.

Start by asking if your objectives are just reasons without numbers. If you haven’t done the harder work of quantifying the results you want related to those reasons, you’ve yet to set objectives, and you won’t be able to measure properly when the program is over.

For each objective you set, challenge yourself with a few questions, before your boss hits you with those “What do you mean by that?” questions. These will get you started:

Who are you targeting? Examples: Current customers, prospects, specific market segments, a specific audience.

What do you want them to do? Examples: Follow/like you, subscribe, download, buy or buy more of specific products or services.

When do you want them to do it? Specify a period or a deadline.

How much of that do you need them to do for you to be happy? Pick a number or a percentage growth vs. a benchmark, like same period last year, and don’t sandbag it or your boss will challenge you some more!

The first three of the above questions help you to define the behaviour you want. In the last one, you quantify that behaviour.

In addition to making it possible to measure your marketing, setting proper objectives also sets expectations and defines success. That makes it easier to decide whether to allocate limited resources to a given initiative.

In truth, my decision isn’t too hard and I’ll probably go for it, assuming I can come up with an angle for my chapter. So my consulting work won’t suffer, I’ll re-allocate non-work time that I’ve allocated to other fun things, like to paint my front porch.

As a business executive or owner of a marketing budget, you must optimize your resources and budget by making good choices about which programs to fund. You’ll have your reasons for wanting to support each program, but be sure to challenge your reasons and objectives with some good questions before The Boss beats you to it.

For you Springsteen lovers, the blog is Your Friday Bruce Fix. I couldn’t tell you sooner as I worried you might never come back!

Filed Under: Approach, Effectiveness, objectives Tagged With: Effectiveness, Management, marketing, Measure, measurement, Metrics, objectives, scorecard

Better Than Nothing

June 26, 2014 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment


Introduction

Perhaps it’s just human nature. We don’t always do the things we know are good for us, like eating oatmeal or measuring marketing. Those who don’t currently do either can be much further ahead, just by doing a little, which is certainly better than nothing.

If you don’t currently measure your marketing, please grab a bowl of oatmeal and read on for four reasons why you should start measuring!

_______________________________________________________________________________________


Last week, my sister Dianne emailed to share her discovery that Bob’s Red Mill makes a quick cooking steel cut oats. We’re both fans of steel cut oats but don’t love how long they take to cook, so this came as good news.

In my reply, I wondered whether they deliver the same health benefits as regular steel cut oats. I recalled reading something about how oats that take longer to cook also take longer to digest, which is somehow more beneficial to your health, although I’m not sure why.

When I raised this health related issue to my sister, her reply was “any steel cut oats is better than none…which is how much I’ve been having lately”. You see, Dianne has a young son who I’ve written about before, and he keeps her pretty busy. Quick, healthy breakfasts are a good thing!

I think Dianne is right. Any steel cut oats is better than none. If you don’t eat steel cut oats, you don’t get the health benefits. Marketing measurement is the same. If you don’t measure, you don’t learn anything that helps you to improve your marketing.

Like mothers of young children, marketers have a lot on their plates. They know measurement is good for them, but many don’t measure as much or as well as they would like. Many others don’t measure at all.

As much as they might like to measure, a full-on approach often isn’t practical, usually due to a shortage of some combination of time, resource and expertise. Still, they need to find a way to get something done, as the benefits of marketing measurement make it worthwhile.

If you don’t already measure your marketing, here are some reasons you should.

 

4 Reasons to Measure Marketing

1. You Will Learn Something Useful: The main problem with not doing any measurement is that you don’t get to learn anything that helps you to make better marketing decisions. If you could measure something, and learn something that helps improve your marketing, that would certainly be better than learning nothing.

2. You Will Set Clear Objectives: Measuring your marketing brings an additional layer of discipline to your marketing decision making. Committing to measurement requires that you to set clear and measurable objectives when planning your marketing programs. It will force you to ask the right questions about each proposed program. Those questions will help you filter out bad ideas and reduce ineffective spending of your limited marketing budget. That alone is worth the price of admission.

3. You Will Have Data: A manager with the responsibility for a marketing budget has two main organizational battles to fight. The first is to fight for budget to fund upcoming marketing programs. The second comes later when it’s time to prove that budget was well spent. If you measure marketing, you will have data with which to fight your battles. Having data is way better than having none and going into battle unarmed.

4. You Will Rank Your Programs by Results: However you choose to measure, make sure you apply one approach consistently across your diverse range of marketing programs. That consistency will give you the ability to rate, rank and compare programs according to their effectiveness at meeting their objectives. You will be able to identify the winners and losers, and you will have a basis on which to make decisions about which types of programs to run in the future.

My sister is right to focus on getting the health benefits from steel cut oats, and if it takes a bit of a short cut to get her there, than that is what she should do. Marketers who don’t measure also need to find a way to get there. I believe in a practical approach to a complex problem as a reasonable and effective way for time-starved marketers to get some measurement done and get the benefits of improved marketing health.

If you measure your marketing, you will learn what works and doesn’t work, so you can optimize your strategies and get better results. Measure… Learn… Optimize… In my books, that’s way better than nothing!

_______________________________________________________________________________________

About the Author: Rick Shea is President of Optiv8 Consulting, a marketing effectiveness consultancy with a focus on helping small to mid-sized organizations measure their marketing so they can stop wasting money.

Copyright ©2014 Optiv8 Consulting.  All rights reserved.

You may reproduce this article by including this copyright and, if reproducing electronically, including a link to:  http://www.optiv8.com/

Filed Under: Approach, Effectiveness Tagged With: Effectiveness, Management, marketing, Measure, measurement, measuring

The Long and Short of It

February 27, 2014 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment


Introduction

Are you a short-term thinker or a long-term thinker? Both? Neither? Maybe you’d like to think about it and get back to me?

Well, today’s post has a little something for both of you, or all of you. However you think, marketing measurement has benefits for you!

_______________________________________________________________________________


Early in my career, I worked for a guy who believed that one of the biggest problems facing the country was an epidemic of short-term thinking. At the time, given my youth and inexperience, I didn’t give this epidemic of his a lot of thought. Over the years, though, I’ve come to realize that he was onto something.

Consider these common examples of short-term thinking:

  • Politicians who seem primarily motivated by getting elected or re-elected, rather than by doing the right thing in the long run for the citizens whose interests they supposedly represent.
  • General managers of professional sports teams who trade away young talent for veteran players. They sometimes make the playoffs and a little extra money for their owners, but rarely do they go on to build championship teams without investing in the long-term development of their young players.
  • Business executives might want to invest in the future but will tend to favour taking actions that contribute to meeting shorter term objectives. Missing those objectives can disappoint financial markets and can cost those executives their bonuses and maybe their jobs.

Short-term thinking can also cause companies to be reluctant to make marketing measurement a priority. It can be difficult to allocate scarce marketing resources towards something they perceive as having a longer-term payback.

Marketers will tend to allocate their resources and budgets towards activities that deliver customers and revenue today. They might think, “Why spend money on measurement, something that will help me next year, when I could spend that money on programs to find more customers this year?”

The pressure to think and behave that way is real, but the perception that marketing measurement’s benefits are exclusively long-term isn’t quite right. The long-term benefits from measurement are significant, but there are also important short-term benefits. Let’s look at both.

 

Long-Term Benefits of Measurement

Better Decisions, Better Results: This is the main and most obvious reason to measure marketing. What you learn will make your marketing more effective.

Optimize Spending, Reduce Waste: Measurement helps you to learn which marketing programs are the most and least effective, so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Organize the Chaos: We live in very data rich times. As technology evolves and as the ways marketers interact with customers become more diverse, you’ll have even more data and it will be harder to make sense of it all. A good measurement system will keep your data from becoming a chaotic mess and will support making the decisions you need to make.


Short-Term Benefits of Measurement

Clear and Measurable Objectives: To commit to measurement, you must also commit to setting objectives for your programs. Proper objectives clearly define success and set expectations. This makes it easier for organizations to initially determine which activities to fund and afterwards, to measure whether they met expectations.

More Scrutiny = Better Marketing: Having to define success and set objectives will require that you examine why you want to do each program before you commit budget to them, and that scrutiny will help prevent bad programs from seeing the light of day. By merely planning to measure, the cream will already start to rise to the top.

Get on the Same Page: To do measurement well, you have to involve people from key functional areas of your business in the development and implementation of your process. The discussions you’ll have will help get everyone on the same page about the intent of your marketing programs and the impact across the organization of the resulting customer behaviour.

Understand the Drivers of Value: Marketing’s purpose is to incent customer behaviour that creates the most value for the organization. Measurement helps you to learn how various types of customer behaviour either create or erode value across your business. That understanding also helps to ensure alignment between your marketing and corporate objectives.

 

We may well live in a world plagued by an epidemic of short-term thinking, but that statement is probably a bit too dramatic, and anyway it’s always best to focus on what you can control.

If it’s short term benefits you need, then marketing measurement will deliver. As a great bonus, you will simultaneously be investing in your long-term marketing effectiveness. Those long-term investments will also help you to meet future short-term objectives.

The long and short of it is that measurement will improve your marketing effectiveness, today and in the future. If you’re not already measuring, what’s stopping you?

 

 

Filed Under: Approach Tagged With: Alignment, Effectiveness, Investment, Management, marketing, Marketing Plan, marketing planning, Measure, measurement, objectives

Planning to Measure

January 30, 2014 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment


Introduction

Hi there, welcome to my first post of 2014, and best wishes for the new year!

When you develop a marketing plan, it’s easy to focus on the plan itself, and to think of measurement as something you’ll do later after executing the plan. The problem is, you also have to plan to measure and the first step in doing that is to set proper objectives in your marketing plan. Today’s post looks at how to embed measurement in your marketing planning process.

_______________________________________________________________________________

 

I’m an advisor to a social enterprise start-up called the Blooms of Joy Project. At our last advisory board meeting, we identified the need for a marketing planning process to help inform some decisions that the founder, Karen, needs to make.

Fortunately, I had recently completed the first draft of a new marketing planning process. I suggested to Karen that working through this process would solve her problem. She’d get a marketing plan out of it, and I’d be able to test my new process with her, get some feedback and learn how to improve my template.

Last week, as we walked through the process together on a Skype call, I found a problem. My new marketing planning process wasn’t making it easy enough to measure properly. Let me explain.

A marketer’s first responsibility requires answering the question “What should we do?” You have a budget and you need to spend it well in your efforts to attract customers, sell products and grow your businesses. That is the focus of a marketing plan, and it was my focus as I developed my process. However, having a good marketing plan isn’t enough.

With the responsibility of spending a marketing budget comes the accountability for spending it wisely. The follow up question to “What should we do?” is “Did it work?” An effective marketing process has to address and connect both questions so that you can continuously improve your effectiveness.

After executing the programs in your plan, you need to measure your results to see whether you achieved the objectives you set in your plan. That last part of that sentence is the key and where I found the problem.

One of the biggest roadblocks to measuring marketing properly is the lack of well-defined objectives. You can’t measure the success of your marketing programs if you don’t first clearly set measurable objectives.

With that in mind, I went back to the drawing board to embed objective setting into key elements of the planning process. Here are the sections of the plan where I did it, and where you should, too.

The Business

A marketing plan should include clearly stated objectives for the key performance indicators in your business, for each source of revenue that you want to affect with your marketing plan. Many of these objectives will roll up into your financial plan for the total business. Examples might include things like revenue, profit, customer counts, transactions, price per transaction and market share.

The Customer

Within this section, there is a Segmentation sub-section that helps you to be clear on who you are targeting. The Profitable Customer Behaviour sub-section is for defining what you want those targeted customers to do and for identifying Characteristics of Ideal Customers. For each product you offer, and for each market segment in which you compete, this section helps you to be clear on whom you want to communicate with through your marketing efforts, and what you want to persuade them to do.

The Plan

When setting objectives for specific marketing programs, it can be very helpful to ask four simple questions:

  1. Who are we targeting? (Target Segments & Ideal Customers)
  2. What exactly do we want them to do or buy? (Ideal Customer Behaviour)
  3. By when do we want them to do that? (To meet your Business Objectives)
  4. How much of that activity do we want them to do? (To meet your Business Objectives)

The Results

This section highlights the need to measure and suggests addressing questions like:

  1. What will your measurement process be?
  2. Who will be responsible?
  3. Where will the data come from?
  4. When will we measure?

The marketing plan is not the place to do all that work, but it is the time to recognize the need for it, to plan for it and to be setting objectives properly so that measurement will even be possible.

This section also addresses Lessons Learned, which is a critical step in optimizing your marketing effectiveness. The lessons you learn from measurement will include identifying the programs that performed best and worst at meeting their specific program objectives, and in helping you to meet your overall business objectives.

We all know that planning and measurement are important, but do we do these things as well as we should? It is equally important to recognize that we need to link them. You can’t measure well without setting proper objectives in the planning process and you can’t improve your next round of planning without measuring how well you did the last time around. Plan to measure, so you can measure your plan!

Filed Under: Approach Tagged With: Effectiveness, Management, marketing, Marketing Plan, Measure, objectives, Planning, Strategy

Rick’s Theory of Relativity

July 23, 2013 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

Introduction

Have you ever noticed how time passes too quickly, and seemingly, much faster than when you were a kid? Well, I’ve noticed and I have a theory why that is. As it turns out, my theory also helps us to measure marketing properly. I know, it doesn’t seem possible for one theory to apply to two such different things, but if you’d like to find out how that can be, please read on!
_______________________________________________________________________________

Last week I spoke by phone with my seven-year-old nephew, Aaron. He was quite excited because he was just a couple of sleeps away from starting his summer vacation in Hilton Head, South Carolina with his mom and dad.

Three summers ago at the age of four, Aaron vacationed in Cape Cod. I flew to Hyannis to join in the fun and to surprise my parents, who were also there. We had a great time and one of the things I enjoyed most was watching Aaron enjoying his vacation.

As I observed and photographed Aaron, I noticed how easily and happily he was able to keep himself occupied. As a four year old with no obvious responsibilities, his main preoccupation was passing the time by entertaining himself, something Aaron did very well.

Do you remember being four years old? I don’t have many specific memories from that age, but I do have some vague recollections of how it felt. I remember how time seemed to stand still and how the summer seemed to last forever.

Now, with a full and busy life, I find that time passes much too quickly. I’ve also noticed how the speed of time’s passing seems to accelerate as I get older. My Theory of Relativity helps to explain why time passes more quickly as we age.

When you’re four years old, one year is 25% of your life. It’s forever. When you’re 50, one year is a mere 2% of your life. Relatively speaking, it’s a blink of an eye.

Whether you are 4 or 50 years old, one year is either 365 or 366 days long. Yet, relative to your current age, a year can seem much shorter or longer than it did or will at other ages.

My Theory of Relativity also informs my approach to marketing measurement. A number on its own is pretty meaningless unless you understand the context in which you’re trying to understand that number.

When you measure marketing, regardless of the specific metric you’re looking at, you want to know exactly how good or bad that number might be. For that, you need context; you need to compare your result to something. That “something” should be an objective.

Setting Good Marketing Objectives

At the risk of stating the obvious, comparing a result to an objective first requires setting an objective. To help you do that well, here are four characteristics of good objectives:

Clear: Well-defined objectives are not easily misunderstood. Identify exactly which key performance indicators (KPI) you are trying to impact with your marketing and by how much. If you want to impact “awareness”, define “who” and “how many” of those you are trying to make aware of “what” about your products or services. If you want to impact “sales”, define “who” you want to buy “how many” units or dollars, of “which” products or services, at “which” price, over “what” period of time.

Measurable: You need to be able to put a precise number to the magnitude of impact you are trying to make on each KPI. Also, make sure you can get the data you need reliably and affordably.

Meaningful: To be meaningful, the KPI you are trying to impact with your marketing should be important to the organization. Success at impacting that KPI should help to create value for the organization. To help identify KPIs, focus on profitable customer behaviour.

Reasonable: This generally means attainable, somewhere between overly conservative (too easy to attain) and overly aggressive (too hard to attain). The level of aggression in your marketing objective setting should be in synch with how aggressive your organization is in setting its overall objectives, as well as with the performance objectives and incentive payment thresholds for its employees and executives.

To measure marketing properly, you need to begin by setting good objectives. Having clear objectives gives you context and a number against which to measure your success. After all, if you’re not clear on where you’re trying to go with your marketing, how will you know when you get there?

Measuring marketing without having clear objectives might be a bit like planning a vacation without a clear destination in mind. Of course, if you do happen to get somewhere and aren’t sure how to pass the time, I know a young consultant who would be happy to advise you!

Filed Under: Approach, objectives Tagged With: Effectiveness, marketing, Measure, measurement, Metrics, objectives

Aligning Interests

June 24, 2013 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

Introduction

Last week something strange happened in front of my house that knocked out the power to my house. I’m glad it happened on a relatively cool day rather than on a hot, sticky day like today.

While I was inconvenienced for about 12 hours in which I had no power, I’m thankful for the inspiration for this month’s newsletter which talks about the importance of aligning marketing’s interests with those of the whole organization and how doing measurement properly helps to get you there.

__________________________________________________________________________

As I opened my front door Wednesday morning to toss a few items into the recycle bin, I quickly realized that something had gone terribly wrong in front of my house.

From my front door, I saw a police officer, two firefighters, three Toronto Hydro linemen, an Atlas Van Lines driver, their respective vehicles, flashing lights, barricades, pylons and a cat. Taking in this scene, it quickly sank in that the large Altas moving van with live hydro wires draped across it, was probably the cause of all the commotion.

Here’s what happened. The van was very tall. The overhead hydro wires, which reach across the street to feed electricity into the houses on my side of the street, hang very low. Tall van + low wires = problem. As the van drove up my street, it snagged and pulled down the wires that feed electricity into MY house, which knocked out my power.

My neighbour Blair saw the whole thing happen. He called 911. The 911 dispatcher called the police, the firefighters and the hydro guys. No one knows who called the cat, or why the cat was there other than to hold the humans in contempt.

Over the next three hours, I had productive conversations with all of the aforementioned, as well as with my insurance agent, the claims adjuster, a contractor and an electrician. All were professional and courteous. But, here’s the thing.

Everyone I talked to had a different agenda, a different boss to answer to, and a different view on how to proceed. I found this both interesting and frustrating, yet not at all unusual. To varying degrees, most organizations experience this.

While this “organization” had been assembled hastily to address the downed power lines situation, it behaved as most organizations behave. That is, the first concerns of the individuals involved were guided by their own self-interests. More importantly, they were able find common ground within those interests and come together around common objectives.

What does this have to do with marketing measurement? I thought you’d never ask! Some of the biggest challenges and benefits of marketing measurement are related to getting everyone on the same page and aligning their interests.

Aligning marketing’s objectives with those of the organization is critical to both the success of marketing measurement efforts and the success of the organization at meeting its overall objectives.

Alignment

Here are three key principles to achieving both types of success:

1. The whole organization must commit to marketing measurement.

Marketing and other parts of the organization need to mobilize around a clearly defined measurement objective, such as finding the best and most effective ways of spending marketing budgets. Marketing can’t and shouldn’t go it alone. It needs support and commitment from the rest of the organization for measurement to work and lead to better spending decisions.

2. The organization and marketing must jointly commit to a measurement methodology.

If marketing unilaterally develops an approach to marketing measurement, others in the organization might think that marketing developed their approach with their own self-interests in mind. That is, they might assume that the methodology is biased towards showing that the marketers in question are brilliant and highly effective.

On the other hand, if marketing involves other elements of the organization that might naturally have competing interests or alternate perspectives on how to measure marketing, then those “competing” interests will bring more balance to the methodology and more acceptance by all of the results.

A joint commitment to a methodology means they must agree on a way to measure marketing’s success. I define success as marketing meeting its objectives and helping the organization to meet its objectives. Objectives-based measurement forces alignment around the objectives themselves.

3. The organization and marketing must jointly decide what to measure.

Focus

Remember that marketing’s purpose is to attract customers who create the most value for the whole organization. That means you need input from each key functional area to know how they each define value, high value customers and profitable customer behaviour. Those definitions will point the way to the key performance indicators that should be included in your measurement.

Including a range of metrics that matter to all aspects of the organization will mean that you will be measuring marketing according to how the whole organization defines success. It will also be easier to get the support and data you need to measure marketing in terms that everyone will understand.

In an organization, everyone has a role to play. Each person has his or her own biases and priorities. At times, it can seem as though different people and parts of the organization have competing interests.

Effective organizations find and focus on the common objectives within those competing interests. One of the most important benefits of measuring marketing based on results vs. objectives is that to do it properly those objectives will need to align with those of the overall organization.

Filed Under: Approach, Metrics, Objectivity Tagged With: Alignment, Effectiveness, Management, marketing, Measure, measurement, Metrics, objectives

Stealth Benefits

May 15, 2013 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

Introduction

You know how when you take a vacation there are usually certain things you must see or do at your chosen destination? For example, when you go to Greece, you have to go to Athens to see the Parthenon. While it’s one of the great and obvious things to see in Athens, I find it interesting how your vacation highlights may well end up being about the unexpected pleasures, like a beautiful scene in the countryside or a chat with a complete stranger at a café.

It turns out that networking and marketing measurement are much the same. Both are well worth doing for all the obvious reasons, but it’s the unexpected stealth benefits that may well end up being the most important.

________________________________________________________________________


Two days ago, I was drinking tea at Starbucks with a consultant I met in February and her business partner. We were enjoying a fun and productive conversation when it suddenly hit me. I love networking.

I know that love is probably too strong a word for my feelings about networking. Still, now that I’ve fully embraced networking as an integral part of building my own business, I can’t imagine my working life without it.

The ParthenonWhen I took my first tentative steps into the world of networking, my dual objectives were to expand my network and find clients, the obvious reasons for networking. While networking has proven to be beneficial on both counts, it has been the other unexpected benefits that I’ve enjoyed the most.

  • I’ve made great friends
  • I’ve built relationships with talented people I’d be happy to employ, work for or with, or recommend.
  • I’ve learned a lot and broadened my perspective.
  • I’ve become a connector, introducing people who could benefit from knowing each other.
  • I’ve become a mentor to students and an advisor to start-ups, and was thrilled to learn last week that the Ryerson DMZ is adding me to their roster of advisors.

I didn’t set out to make any of these things happen, but they did. While less obvious than growing my network and finding clients, these unexpected benefits are important and impactful, both personally and professionally. I call them stealth benefits because they sneak up on you. Without warning and undetected, they just happen.

In that respect, marketing measurement is a lot like networking. There are obvious benefits from measurement, and there is at least one multifaceted stealth benefit. The obvious benefits include:

  • Finding out which marketing programs work or don’t work.
  • Knowing where to cut budgets or where to invest more
  • Improving overall marketing effectiveness
  • Driving better business results

Delphi CountrysideMarketing measurement also delivers the very powerful, and perhaps unexpected stealth benefit of bringing more discipline to the marketing function and the broader organization. Here are three facets of this stealth benefit:

 

1. You will set better marketing objectives.

Good measurement requires first setting clear and measurable objectives for your marketing programs. If you don’t know precisely what you want your marketing to do for you, then how will you know if it worked? As they say, “If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you’ve arrived?”

To measure marketing properly, you have to set proper objectives. Without clear objectives, you won’t know what to measure or if your results are any good. You’ll also run the risk that your measurement might really just be counting, as I wrote about here.

 

2. Marketing will align properly with your whole business.

Your company’s strategic planning and budget setting should guide the setting of marketing objectives. Marketing helps to deliver against the budgeted revenue and profit objectives. When you plan specific marketing programs, set objectives that align with and roll up to those company objectives committed to in the budget.

Measurement is most effective when the whole organization commits to it. This brings the right people from different functional areas to the same table to agree on what marketing success means for the whole business and what to measure. Measurement helps to get everyone on the same page.


3. Your marketing programs will focus more on the right things.

The best marketing delivers more of what I call “Profitable Customer Behaviour”. What, when, where, how much and how often they buy, how and how much they pay, whether they are costly to manage or service, whether they refer new customers, etc. all impact the profitability of each customer and the overall business.

To uncover what Profitable Customer Behaviour means for your organization, ask people in different functional areas to complete the following statement:

We’d make more money if more of our customers (did this): (fill in the blank) .

Clearly defining profitable customer behaviour helps to clarify what marketing needs to achieve in order to create the most value for the business. Those clear definitions also force everyone to focus on the impact that various types of customer behaviour have on their part of the organization, and how that affects the bottom line.

 

Measurement brings additional discipline to marketing decision making, and that can only be a good thing. It may not be the first benefit you think of when you commit to measuring marketing, but the stealth benefit of that increased discipline will happen, whether or not you see it coming.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sneak up on some more networking opportunities!

Filed Under: Approach Tagged With: Effectiveness, Management, marketing, Measure, measurement, objectives, Planning, Strategy
« Older Posts