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3 minute read
A good marketing strategy is rich in research, data and insights.
As the marketing strategy evolves into a marketing plan, individual metrics for particular platforms, channels, media and funnels come into view.
In no time at all, marketers can become overwhelmed with metrics and may start to feel dizzy among the swirling data.
It’s an important skill to be comfortable switching between macro and micro metrics depending on who you’re talking to and which questions are being asked.
Some organisation and planning can help clear through this murkiness to help reveal what’s important to whom and in which contexts.
A key question to ask yourself is: Who is your audience?
Think about who is asking you a question or who you’re presenting marketing metrics to. What does their day to day look like, what questions will they be asking themselves?
For example if you’re talking directly to senior business leaders responsible for running the business, particularly if they don’t have marketing backgrounds themselves, it’s probably best to start the conversation (whether that be answering a question or presenting an update) at the macro level, but be ready to go into the detail if required.
Think about your businesses’ objective. Are you trying to build market share or hit a certain revenue goal? How have your marketing activities been contributing towards that? How are you able to correlate that relationship and to what degree of confidence?
Also think through the key results your business measures itself against to track its pacing towards the objective. These metrics may be even easier to demonstrate marketings’ contribution if they’re metrics such as number of new leads or customers generated, retention and advocacy metrics etc.
Being able to confidently articulate how the marketing budget is helping to generate new revenue and retaining ongoing revenue from existing customers, coupled with estimates on Return on Ad Spend and even better, Return on Investment will be reassuring and hopefully impressive to senior business leaders. It may also be the only level of detail required.
That said, it’s rare that everything is always going to plan in a business and marketing plan. There are always some key results and objectives that are pacing behind target, that will need attention. These conversations are usually where it’s necessary to go a level deeper, further into the micro metrics to uncover what may be causing the under-delivery and also what can be done about it.
By being prepared to talk to the macro metrics (such as the business objective and key results), you should be able to see where the problem areas are and therefore also prepare for any questions requiring such a deep-dive.
If new customer leads are lower than target, looking further into your acquisition marketing tactics and reviewing what your estimates have been in the planning stage versus what the actuals are looking like will help you understand where the immediate gaps are.
Some tactics might be on track to deliver against your original estimate, whereas others may be falling behind. You can then dig deeper into these tactics and review their funnel performance from first impression to customer conversion to understand where in the funnel the conversion rate is lower than predicted.
With a good understanding of this, you’ll then be better placed to help business leaders understand where original assumptions may have been off, where the focus needs to be honed as a business, in order to resolve the under-performance or help guide where the shift in priorities should be to compensate and get back on track.
On the flip side, if you’re talking to your product or sales peers or delivering detailed weekly reports to your immediate leader it may be more appropriate to start in the weeds but be able to demonstrate how they ladder back up to the business objective and key results.
Being able to demonstrate the connection between the weekly average Click Through Rate of a social campaign or the number of impressions delivered from a digital out of home campaign and what success looks like to the business, helps provide much needed context for the daily/weekly performance of marketing.
When looking at the micro-level marketing metrics it’s also important to zoom out and ask whether a tactic has had enough time or budget to show conversion through the funnel before making any big decisions on optimisations or budget shifts, as cutting or changing something too soon could result in a lost opportunity and constant, distracting, unnecessary pivoting.
Thinking ahead on who you’re talking to and which level of marketing metrics they’d likely find most value in, will help you structure your information and time more effectively, as well as impress those you’re in front of.
It’s an incredibly helpful approach in being able to keep a clear head when dealing with an overwhelming volume of data as well.
Putting data in its place, understanding where it sits in a hierarchy from business objective down to channel metrics allows you to more confidently travel between the macro and micro but most importantly, understand what’s working, what’s not, what needs more time, and where energy needs to be channelled to ensure a business stays on track.
In short, it’s a key secret ingredient to better marketing.
