The More Metrics In Place, The Better Your Marketing?

The More Metrics In Place, The Better Your Marketing?

With all the marketing metrics currently available to your business, you can track everything from the number of emails opened — to how many seconds your video is watched – to how many Instagrams are liked and shared.

Having a way to measure individual aspects of your marketing campaign is, in general, a great idea. But like so many other things pertaining to data collection, how you utilize that information is another thing entirely.

For example, if your new video doesn’t hold your customer’s attention for more than a few seconds, do you:

• Dump it! It’s not working.
• Re-edit the opening to make it more compelling.
• Change out the music track to something catchier.
• Or — change where on your website your customer downloads the video?

Each of those changes could be part or all of the solution. But just looking at your data metrics won’t provide the answer.

Google, who practically invented marketing metrics, emphasizes three key factors to measure and understand how any marketing campaign is working. Google says to:

• Measure your customer’s attention (are they interested or not?)
• Analyze their behavior in response to your approach or campaign (do they share or comment on it?)
• How is your campaign affecting consumer behavior (any improvement in sales?)

As much as we are all about analyzing the metrics of any marketing campaign, we also know that some aspects of marketing take more time to build customer response than others. Sometimes you just want to push widgets out the door.

Other times you want to build brand value with a hard-hitting brand awareness campaign. In this case, the value of awareness of your brand is huge and intrinsically linked to the number of brand impressions created. That means getting the number of impressions up — data. How to get the reach – and get the impressions to stick – that’s good creative messaging.

Sometimes a hard-hitting two-platform social media campaign is a great way to piqué interest in something new. Other times you may need a variety of platforms to tell your story to several different age groups or ethnicities in multiple ways.

Marketing is complicated. So although data collection can be very helpful in understanding and vetting it, it can just as often muddy the waters for awhile – while something compelling is beginning to take root.

It’s smart to consider data analytics as part of your overall strategy, pulling in as many sources of information — and feedback about that information — from as many varying sources and departments as possible.