I’ve recently had a change in my job description that has caused me to put more focus on how I think about measurability in marketing and PR. To the advertising industry, measurement is often regarded as a nuisance… after all, burying your head in data after all the sexy stuff is done is not why most of us got into the industry. The reality, however, is that if you’re in charge of a brand, either as a manager or as someone representing a client, measurement is a necessary evil.
For a while, “branding” was the order of the day. This was great for agencies, because it’s in many ways an unquantifiable, ethereal concept that has very little in the way of tangible qualities. In other words, as long as you were “growing the brand,” it was much harder to hold anyone accountable, since there wasn’t anything to account for. This is not to say that measurement wasn’t done – but that it was much less of a concern than it is today.
The era of brand-centric marketing has given way to results-driven marketing, and with it has come an avalanche of tools with which to measure, quantify and analyze. Google Analytics democratized online measurement when it bought one of the top analytics companies around, rebranded it, and offered its services free to anyone who wanted it. Online CRM solutions like Salesforce.com allows us to measure our sales funnel in real time, and tools like Vocus allow us to measure the efficacy of our media relations, right from the comfort of our browsers.
The current reality of marketing communications management is that it is simpler than ever to measure the results of our efforts, but with this new simplicity comes a new problem – a disease of affluence. With all the data available to us with relative ease, there is a real temptation to measure everything we can, or to structure programs in a way that would allow things to be more measurable. In many cases, though, we can affect the outcome of our program by the way we measure or track it.
Say for instance, you have a brilliantly researched, written and targeted ebook / white paper / manifesto that you are providing to your clients free of charge in order to establish yourself or your company as a knowledge leader in your space. There are now two competing schools of thought on how to handle this. The first – the marketing-centric approach, would associate the document with an integrated CRM in order to funnel visitors into a sales funnel, qualify them, and follow up. The second, influenced by social media and the share-alike mentality of the blogosphere would provide it to everyone who visited their site without registering, and encourage their visitors to send it to as many people as they can, to post it on their blogs for download and to print it out and share it with friends.
The first approach is very measurable, and can be tracked all the way from download to sale. Marketers like this, but the audience is limited by the locked-down manner of measurement. The second is virtually impossible to track, but reaches much farther than any marketing department can, using existing nodes of influence to share an idea.
There is no “right” way to track a campaign of this nature – both have their own place. The thing to keep in mind is that how we decide to measure a campaign can directly affect its outcome. Success is defined in many ways, but it’s important to remember that sometimes, the greatest successes cannot be measured directly.
