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!

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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.

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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

Running with Flawed Assumptions

September 19, 2013 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

Introduction

Have you ever made a flawed assumption? OK, maybe not you, but perhaps that has happened to someone you know.

Those of us who are more fallible than you sometimes make such mistakes. This month’s newsletter relates a story that reminded me of the importance of testing our assumptions to see if they are right, and also how the metrics we use to measure marketing need to be focused on our objectives.

I have to run, but please read on!
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I had lunch with my friend Charlotte the other day. In addition to being a lovely person, Charlotte is an avid runner and cyclist, and is one of several fit friends whose examples inspire me to get exercise.

Earlier this summer, I decided to take my morning walks in Monarch Park to the next level. First, I relocated my walks to the nice new running track at Monarch Park Stadium. Then, I slowly began injecting one-minute intervals of running into my 45-minute walks. I topped that off with a bit of stair climbing in the grandstand, and presto, I was doing interval training!

The first day I ran just four one-minute intervals, with a one minute walk in between. Each day I added a one-minute running interval until I was up to 15 one-minute runs. Then I started the process again but with two-minute running intervals, working up to 10 of those. The idea is to gradually work my way up to a longer total run featuring fewer but longer intervals, perhaps until I can run a marathon, or failing that, at least to the Beer Store and back.

Between bites of my tuna salad sandwich, I bragged to Charlotte about how by that morning I had built up to four 5-minute runs and two 4-minute runs. Charlotte congratulated me and then, I suspect inadvertently, inspired this newsletter by asking me how many minutes in total I was running most days. I guessed around 20 to 25 minutes even though that morning’s math (4 X 5 minutes, plus 2 X 4 minutes) suggested 28 minutes. I guessed low because I suspected my calculation was flawed. Here’s why.

When I started running, I found that the easiest way to keep track of my intervals was to split the track into 4 quarters; run 1/4, walk 1/4, and then repeat. My unit of measurement for how long I ran or walked quickly became track quarters rather than minutes.

Still, I wondered how many minutes I was running. I don’t wear a watch but it felt like each quarter took me about one minute to cover, and so I assumed one full lap took about four minutes.

I’m sure you can see the problem. I run a quarter lap faster than I can walk the same distance, and my internal clock that guessed at one minute is not likely accurate. But, I wasn’t too concerned about that. I don’t really care about my speed or lap times; I’m just trying to get some exercise to improve my overall health.

Without realizing it, while I had chosen a useful metric for keeping track of my intervals (quarters of laps), I was basing all my running time calculations on two casually made but flawed assumptions, namely that:

  • 1/4 lap = 1 minute
  • I run and walk at the same speed

Here are three simple lessons from this about metrics that apply equally to my interval training and marketing measurement.

1) Test Your Assumptions

It’s good to know if your assumptions are wrong. Using the timer on my cell phone the other day, I discovered that my five minute runs (1 1/4 laps) were actually about three minutes long. With that new information, I will probably adjust my training plan a little.

If any of your marketing measurement assumptions are based on poorly gathered or perhaps old data, such as research or analysis done under different market conditions, it may be time to revisit your assumptions.

2) Choose Metrics with Your Objectives in Mind

My specific training objective is to push myself, bit by bit, to work out a little harder each day. I measure my progress by tracking and increasing my distance-based intervals. I also check my heart rate when I’m done.

Make sure you’re clear about the specific objectives for each marketing program and pick metrics that measure the right things. Challenge your choice of metrics by asking yourself if knowing that number will help you to know whether your marketing programs are successful.

3) Align Program Objectives with Overall Objectives

Getting good results against my interval and heart rate objectives should lead to success against my overall objective of better health. One metric for that is my weight. So, I hop on the scale now and then to ensure my weight is heading in the right direction.

Your marketing program objectives should relate to customer activity that leads to better results against overall corporate objectives, such as revenue and profit. Strong results against the right program objectives should translate into hitting your company’s financial objectives.

Running around with flawed assumptions in my head really wasn’t a problem in this case because those assumptions were about an unimportant metric relative to my objectives.

If you’re running a marketing department or managing a marketing budget, a clear focus on your objectives will help you identify the right metrics for your measurement efforts. It’s also healthy to challenge any assumptions about your data and to test those assumptions to help keep your marketing on track.

Filed Under: Approach Tagged With: Alignment, Assumptions, Management, marketing, Measure, Metrics, objectives

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!
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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.

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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.

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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

Counting or Measuring?

March 25, 2013 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

I recently attended a marketing industry event in Toronto where a presenter made a statement about marketing measurement that got me thinking and eventually inspired this month’s newsletter.

While talking about current trends in marketing, the speaker identified marketing measurement as one of the top issues currently facing marketing executives. He talked about how technology and big data have become pervasive in marketing, while also suggesting that as an industry we have yet to figure out how to measure marketing properly and make sense out of all the data.

This got me thinking because I realized an aspect of this point of view was consistent with the mixed messages I have been noticing in marketing measurement circles. Measurement is a hot topic and a growing industry. Yet, for all the talk and activity, and the apparent progress we’ve made, there still seems to be a strong point of view out there that marketers aren’t measuring as well as they would like.

Measurement is Everywhere

On one hand, it seems as though wherever I go, whatever I read, whoever I talk to, measurement keeps coming up. With all the buzz about data and analytics tools, you would think that everyone is measuring effectively.

I also keep hearing about new and/or improved marketing analytics tools and approaches. This is especially true regarding digital, social and mobile marketing as there is so much innovation happening in these channels. As new platforms emerge with new ways for brands to interact with customers, so do new data gathering and analytics tools to measure the interactions on those and other platforms.

We’re Not Measuring Very Well

On the other hand, while there certainly is a lot of talk about measurement, and probably a lot of action, I’m sensing that few companies are truly happy with their measurement efforts. There is excitement about the availability of so much data, yet there are also growing challenges related to the complexity and cost of sorting out all that data and clarifying the degree to which marketing is working.

Social media provides a great illustration of the notion that measurement is everywhere but we’re not measuring very well. There are plenty of social media platforms with which to engage consumers, and dozens, if not hundreds, of tools for gathering data about those engagements.

Yet, despite all the data that is available, I keep hearing suggestions that we’re not measuring very well. In the same week earlier this month, a digital marketing agency president told me that no one has figured out how to measure social media properly, and a marketing researcher told me her clients don’t measure social media, they just keep trying an assortment of things in the hopes that enough of it will work.

Why the Mixed Messages?

So, why all the talk but seemingly so little satisfactory action? I’m starting to think part of the problem is that we don’t all define measurement the same way. Let’s look at a dictionary definition of measurement.

  • to ascertain the extent, dimensions, quantity, capacity, etc., of, especially by comparison with a standard: to measure boundaries.
  • to estimate the relative amount, value, etc., of, by comparison with some standard: to measure the importance of an issue.

Contrast that with a dictionary definition of counting:

  • to check over (the separate units or groups of a set) one by one to determine the total number; add up; enumerate: He counted his tickets and found he had ten.
  • to include in a reckoning; take into account: There are five of us here, counting me.

Are you Counting or Measuring?

Maybe a lot of the measurement that is happening out there is really just counting, and maybe those counting are the ones feeling the most discomfort. To be fair, there’s no shame in counting well, which involves gathering data accurately, reliably and consistently. Proper counting is an essential step that comes before measurement. Good quality data makes proper measurement possible.

Still, those who are mostly just counting and who may well be gathering great data with the latest analytics tools are likely not learning enough from their “measurement” efforts. Pure counting is not nearly as actionable as measuring against something, such as an objective or a comparable benchmark, such as another marketing program.

Measurement delivers its greatest benefits when it enables you to understand which marketing programs are creating the most value for your company and, therefore, how best to deploy your marketing budget in the future. Good quality measurement makes better decision making possible.

So, what action can you take if you are feeling frustrated by marketing measurement? Start by questioning whether you are counting or measuring. Look at the important data you have about any marketing program. Taking one metric at a time, ask yourself questions like “How good is that number?” and “Compared to what?”.

If most of the time you don’t have a good answer, you may well be stalled at the counting stage. On the other hand, if you can assess how good a metric is vs. an objective or some sort of standard, or if you can rank programs according to an overall rating, then you are measuring. If you are able to make better decisions about how to allocate your marketing budgets and that leads to better business outcomes, then you may already be well ahead of the pack!

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

Predictions and Marketing Knowledge Succession

January 31, 2013 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

On January 15th, I attended Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions 2013. The presentation was delivered at The Carlu in Toronto by Duncan Stewart, Deloitte Canada’s Director of Research.

I enjoy attending events like this for two main reasons. The first is for the content, as it helps me to stay on top developments and trends that impact my clients and the environment in which they operate.

The second reason is for the networking and to possibly meet new people or bump into a familiar face or two. One of the familiar faces I saw after the event belonged to my friend and fellow consultant, Rob Coatsworth. After a quick hello, we decided to go chat over a coffee.

One topic of our conversation was knowledge succession, which is one of Rob’s areas of expertise. Knowledge succession helps organizations to capture, retain and pass on the experience-based knowledge that individual employees accumulate, rather than have the knowledge leave when employees leave the organization.

While knowledge succession is hardly a new challenge, I found our conversation thought provoking because I think the challenge is now greater than ever, and I believe this is especially true for marketers. Here are some reasons why:

General Environmental Factors

Multiple Jobs Per Career. The days of working for one company your whole career and getting the gold watch upon retirement are long gone. Employer/employee relationships are less loyal and have evolved from being career-long marriages to serially monogamous relationships. At some point, either or both parties decide that it’s time to move on and try something new.

Short-Term Financial Pressures. The financial markets exert tremendous pressure on publicly traded companies to hit their quarterly financial targets. Senior executives whose compensation is tied to hitting those financial targets often reduce headcount and salary expense in order to hit those targets. Well paid long service employees, who generally have accumulated the most knowledge are attractive targets to be let go for the expense that can be saved.

Aging Baby Boomers Will Retire. While the impact of this has been delayed by the volatility in financial markets, a large number of highly experienced and long service employees are at an age where they would like to retire if they could, and will when they can, taking their knowledge with them.

Marketing Environmental Factors

Marketers Change Jobs Frequently. Employers value marketers with a range of experiences working on different brands in different categories for different companies. That encourages marketers to keep changing jobs to drive up their marketability and market value.

Accelerating Marketing Complexity and Speed. Marketing is changing rapidly, with innovation, technology and media fragmentation driving much of that change. There are more ways to communicate with consumers and many more touch points along the path to purchase. The pace at which marketers have to execute campaigns leaves them little time between campaigns to measure and learn from past efforts.

Measurement and Marketing Knowledge Succession

Organizations that want to improve their marketing effectiveness need to learn from their successes and failures. That means they need to measure and learn which campaigns are most and least effective, so they can adjust their strategies going forward.

Without an organizational approach to capturing and retaining the lessons learned, it is left to individual marketers to do their own learning. So long as they stay, the organization will benefit but if they decide to leave, the knowledge will leave with them.

The reality is that employees leave and unless companies find ways to learn along with the employees, they are just training their competitors’ future marketing talent. A big step in the right direction is to measure all marketing.

Here’s a five step plan for Marketing Knowledge Succession:

  1. Commit to learning. Broaden your focus on executing marketing programs efficiently and effectively to also include learning from those programs to enhance future strategies and tactics.
  2. Embrace measurement as the key to learning what works and what doesn’t for your brands. Track your success at meeting each campaign’s objectives.
  3. Adopt a measurement methodology that can be applied consistently across brands, programs and time. A consistent methodology will give you benchmarks and a basis for rating and ranking programs.
  4. Measure the things that matter. Choose metrics that indicate whether your marketing is driving profitable customer behaviour and creating value for your business. Keep in mind those Key Performance Indicators that matter to financial markets, owners, investors and business managers and find a way to connect your marketing measurement to the health of the business.
  5. Keep good records. Make sure you have a way to securely collect, store and share the results of your measurement efforts. You’ll be building a knowledge data base that current and future marketers in your organization can use to refine their strategies and execute more effective programs.

Knowledge succession has a medium to long term focus, but committing to it also provides short-term benefits. To be able to aggregate and pass knowledge along, you first have to capture it.

To learn what works and doesn’t work in marketing, you have to measure it, and what you learn can pay dividends on your very next campaign. That will benefit both marketers and their employers, today and in the future.

This is not a prediction, unlike those presented by Deloitte, but I do firmly believe that organizations who commit to marketing measurement and knowledge succession will have a brighter future.


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

Christmas Giving

December 19, 2012 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

I used to think that Christmas was all about the gifts, especially the receiving of gifts. As a kid, I remember the excitement of flipping through the Eaton’s and Sears catalogues and telling my parents which gifts I wanted Santa to bring me. My Christmas spirit was all about what was in it for me!

Of course, as I grew older my focus on gifts gradually shifted from receiving to the thrill of giving great gifts. Seeking out those great gifts became a big part of my getting into the Christmas spirit.

For a number of years, my siblings and I shared a fun tradition of going to our local mall on the afternoon of December 24th to pick up last minute gifts and stocking stuffers. Part of the fun was seeing who we’d bump into at the mall, like my high school gym teacher, Mr. Martin. I didn’t have the wisdom to ask him but I suspect he was there every year to see who he could bump into. Maybe that was one of his Christmas traditions and a way for him to get into the spirit.

With time, I’ve come to realize that much of my Christmas spirit comes from the traditions I’ve shared with my family. For example, we have many eating traditions; tourtière and French onion soup for Christmas Eve dinner, croissants on Christmas morning, the big turkey dinner, and of course a vast selection of desserts suitable for any meal or between meals!

A fun tradition emerged quite by accident one year when my mom gave each of us four kids a flexible, pliable little Santa Claus. We quickly realized we could entertain ourselves and each other by bending and twisting Santa into a new position, and then giving him a new name. I’m not quite sure how it started but it’s likely that my brother Jim had something to do with it. Here are a few favourites:

You get the idea. The possibilities are endless. This year, I have decided to print Christmas cards for my three nephews featuring these and other versions of Santa in the hopes it might inspire them to develop some silly traditions of their own.

I still enjoy giving gifts and in that spirit, I’ve got one for you. All you have to do is ask for it.

As a reader of this newsletter, you are probably aware that I advocate using a scorecard to measure your marketing effectiveness. I’ve developed a new version of my scorecard and I’d like to know what you think of it.

I’d like to give you a generic template of my scorecard so that you can customize and use it in your business to measure your marketing. I’ll also include an example to help you understand how to use it. I’ll send it to you as an Excel file so it will be easy to work with.

The scorecard is not designed to be a stand-alone product but rather part of a larger measurement process, so you may need a little help to get started. I’d be happy to provide some guidance by phone or whatever method makes sense.

In exchange, I’ll ask you for some feedback to see if I’m on track with this new version of the scorecard. In general, here are the kinds of things I’ll want to learn about:

  • How was the overall experience of working with this scorecard?
  • How do you feel using the scorecard has helped or could help to improve your marketing effectiveness?
  • Is this approach to measuring marketing suitable for your business?
  • How could the scorecard be improved?
  • What would stop you from using it?

I’m open minded about where our follow up discussion might go and what we might each learn in the process. I think that we should both benefit from this and that we might learn something unexpected.

If you’d like to receive your Optiv8 Christmas gift, email me at rick@optiv8.com and I will send you the scorecard. Please make sure to include your contact information so I can follow up with you in the new year.

I look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, I’ll be making Christmas cards for my nephews!

Filed Under: Approach Tagged With: Effectiveness, marketing, Measure, measurement, ROI, scorecard

Leap of Faith

October 22, 2012 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

I have to admit that marketing measurement was the last thing on my mind as I watched daredevil Felix Baumgartner take his extraordinary leap of faith from a balloon at an altitude of 128,100 feet. The only thing on my mind was that Felix was clearly out of his.

Few things in life are certain, but I am quite certain that I could never do anything like that jump. It would require a bravery possessed by very few people on the planet. I’m not one of them, nor am I out of my mind, at least that’s what I think!

As I thought more about whether Felix might actually be out of his mind, I decided that while he definitely was brave, he probably wasn’t crazy. I also realized he needed something more than his bravery to make such a jump.

I consider Felix’s plunge towards the New Mexico desert a leap of faith because, before he could hop off that ledge into a four plus minute free fall, Felix absolutely had to believe in three things:

  • His Team – That they knew what they were doing and wouldn’t let him down.
  • His Technology – That his spacesuit would protect him and that his parachute would open BEFORE he hit the ground.
  • Himself – That no matter what happened, he could handle it, such as pulling out of a wild spin before blacking out or dying.

Without these beliefs, I’m pretty sure Felix wouldn’t have jumped, as the risks and the price of failure would have seemed insurmountable. One mistake, one miscalculation or one malfunction could certainly have killed him.

By contrast, a decision to measure marketing is considerably less risky and dramatic than a decision to jump to earth from the edge of space. Still, it can seem daunting to leap into marketing measurement as there are some risks, including that you might:

  • Not learn anything that helps you improve your marketing
  • Waste precious resources, like money and time
  • Expose the fact that some of your marketing is ineffective

While these are legitimate concerns, there are lessons from Felix’s leap of faith that we can apply to marketing measurement which also help to mitigate those risks.

Believe in what you’re doing: There are many ways to approach marketing measurement. What matters is to commit to a methodology that you can execute consistently. If your organization can commit to an approach and stick with it, then you greatly improve your chances of success. Much of what you will learn will come from applying one approach across all forms of marketing spending.

Get all team members on the same page: Successful teams focus on common goals. Everyone needs to understand and agree on your reasons for measuring, on what you’re trying to learn and on how you define measurement success.

Get the help you need: Support your measurement efforts appropriately, with the people, time, expertise and funding you need. You may have sufficient internal resources or you may need to supplement those resources with external help. It’s tough to take that leap if you think you will be out there on your own.

Remember that it’s a journey: Your efforts to develop effective measurement practices will likely be a long journey with a lot of small victories along the way, and probably a few mistakes, too. The full experience of that journey with all the victories and mistakes is where you’ll learn what you need to know to succeed. The things you’ll learn along the way will often pay dividends immediately, like helping to identify and eliminate ineffective marketing programs.

I can imagine that Felix overcame many obstacles in the years, months and days leading up to his big jump. The spectacular success of his jump was not so much a single event as it was an end point in a journey, and while it may be an end point for Felix, it is also a key milestone in an ongoing journey for science and space exploration.

Those who succeed at marketing measurement make a commitment to the journey and begin that journey believing they have what it will take to overcome obstacles, mitigate risks and achieve success. They also know that by making sure they have the right stuff for measurement – a blend of people, expertise, technology and methodology – they can believe in their journey and take their own much less risky leap of faith.

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