With Measurement, The Sky’s The Limit

Show Notes

There are four components of effective marketing measurement. This week s podcast explores how measuring investment, outcomes, attribution and time can help us determine ROI, so we can finally have an answer to our client s biggest question: is my marketing working?

Four Components of Effective Measurement (02:40 – 4:49)

• Investment – the hard and soft investments that determine ROI
• Outcomes – what it means to be successful
• Attribution – which investments take credit for which outcomes
• Time – how time impacts your measurement and reporting

Why We Chose This Topic (04:49 – 06:30)

• Clients often ask what is my ROI? or is my marketing working
• Many organizations measure for measurements sake and look at the wrong metrics
• Most marketers aren t analysts by trade. Understanding how to make measurement actionable doesn t come naturally.

#1 – Investment (06:30 – 09:00)

• Knowing the hard and soft costs of investment is the first step to calculating ROI
• Investment includes money and resources, or where time and effort has been going
  • Ex: The investment behind a company blog includes the cost to promote blog posts, and the time required to write, edit and publish posts.
  • Ex: The investment of a pay-per-click campaign includes the hard costs of what we pay per click. Soft costs include internal management of the campaign.

#2 – Outcomes (09:02 – 16:00)

• This component focuses on discovering if we moved the needle. The trick is to know what needle we are supposed to be moving, or what is the right metric?
• Knowing our key performance indicator is essential. KPIs indicate success of a marketing program.
• Some programs have multiple KPIs. Some are leading indicators, others are trailing indicators.
• Leading indicators: Things we can report on today that let us know we are on the right path.
• Trailing indicators: Things that we can report on in the future that let us know if we have overall success.
  • Ex: In a pay-per-click campaign, the leading indicator would be clicks and sales. Trailing indicators would be lifetime value of a customer.
  • Ex: in a company blog, the leading indicator would be dwell time on blog posts, shares or repeat visits. Trailing indicators would include new clients or retained clients.

Charity Break – Waterkeeper Alliance – (16:00 – 16:42)

#3 – Attribution (16:43 – 23:47)

• Attribution is how to connect investment to outcomes.
• There are a number of attribution models to help us know which investments result in which outcomes.
• First and last touch attribution are simple models of attribution. They say that one outcome is the result of one investment. These are inaccurate and don t take the entire customer journey into consideration.
• Multi-touch attribution is more complex, but more accurate. This spreads the responsibility of the sale across multiple touchpoints.
• Digital marketing uses tagged URLs to help us know when a touchpoint occurs and which investments are responsible for that touchpoint.
• Traditional marketing uses surveys of new and existing customers to see what they can recall from advertising. They also look at probability that a prospect saw a piece of marketing.

#4 – Time (23:48 – 33:00)

• To make metrics actionable, we must measure our data across a length of time. Trends and experiments play into this.
• Trends tell us how past performance of a metric can predict the future success or failure of our marketing.
• Experiments test how an output would change if we changed one input of our media. It tests how it would change the trend we ve identified.
• Marketing programs need enough time for data to accumulate so it s actionable
• Iterative Marketing uses marketing programs, which do not have a start and end date
• Gathering enough data allows us to have statistical significance in analysis
• Our cadence with analysis and experimentation is monthly, with weekly checks on the media. Heavy analysis occurs at the end of the month.

Summary (33:05 – 34:08)

We hope you want to join us on our journey. Find us on IterativeMarketing.net, the hub for the methodology and community. Email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net, follow us on twitter at @iter8ive or join The Iterative Marketing Community LinkedIn group.

The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.

Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio

Onward and upward!

The post With Measurement, The Sky’s The Limit appeared first on Iterative Marketing.