Episode C4.007 (AUSTRALASIA) Marketing Metrics

Introduction
 
Building on previous shows, why are Marketing Metrics important?
Because, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

​But what should we be measuring?

Now when I was putting my notes together for this show and I understood today’s show was to be about marketing metrics the first thing I did was Google marketing metrics. You would not believe how many websites there are that tell you how crucial their particular list of marketing objectives is.
Google it now… I dare you.

And those crucial marketing Can include anything from revenue to cost per lead to website traffic and lead ratio to landing page conversion rates to social media engagement to customer lifetime value and churn rate and blah blah blah the list goes on.
But essentially if we are measuring marketing success, we need to understand what outcome we are looking to achieve. There is no one list of marketing metrics that is right for every business in the world. But the one marketing metric that remains absolutely crucial to any company is the marketing metric of brand awareness.

There is a distinct difference between a marketing metric and a sales metric.

Advertising, sales, conversions etc… they are all functions or outcomes from marketing.

When we market our business as a whole, we are marketing the brand.

When we're marketing a product that has a whole different purpose to marketing the brand. So therefore, the metrics need to be different.
Today I'd like to talk about marketing a brand and what metrics should be used to market that brand.

Why? Because your brand and what your business stands for is the one consistent. Products may vary prices will change the market will fluctuate but the one thing that should always remain consistent is the value of your brand.

The equity in your brand is what makes your business a success.
During my broadcasts you're going to hear me talk a lot about Apple. I love Apple there I said it on record I love Apple.

Why because Apple is an absolutely perfectly marketed brand in my opinion. Why? Because you will never see Apple discount their product you will always see queues and queues and queues of people stood outside the Apple store waiting to buy the latest iPhone or the latest iPad or the latest Mac book or whatever their product is they absolutely generate a frenzy when it comes to new products. That is a brilliantly marketed brand. Apple resides in the hearts of its customer. And that is exactly where a good brand lives.

This is IBGR network and this is show C4 the C stands for marketing and sales the four stands for you have a business which you have grown and you have established and you have pretty much maxed out the capacity of the business almost maxed out the capacity of the business in its current form you have an established business.

You've been through growth you've done the hard yards and the business is stable. Now it's time to really understand our brand it's time to get your potential customer to really understand your brand. Why am I so passionate about brand? Well the reason is that people don't buy products people buy brands. People buy with their hearts not their heads. So, when you are considering your marketing objectives and you're considering the metrics to use to measure your marketing success you have to be really clear on what outcomes we are looking to achieve. You cannot measure success without first understanding what we are trying to achieve.

Draw 5 circles. Put a vertical line between them.

Unknown
Known
Something
Respected
Loved

Now every business in the world resides in one of those circles. You may reside in a different circle for different target markets. Our task is to figure out which target market we want to focus on 1st to move from one circle to the next. Our ultimate objective is to have our brand loved. Why? Because people buy with their hearts not their heads. You're going to hear me say that a lot.

By the end of our time together today, you are going to understand what each of those circles means and I'm going to help you to figure out where you sit in the brand journey.
 
SEGMENT 2:
Key Issues - Owner Perspective:
 
In the first part of the show, I asked why are Marketing Metrics important?

Because, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
But what should we be measuring?

Your business is now at a stage of life where you made the bold move to start it probably some years ago you have put blood sweat and tears into building it you have carved out a niche or a unique selling proposition you understand your competition you understand your market and you have a well-rounded business.

What we need to do now is figure out where in the brand journey your business sits with your target consumer. Now that could be different with different audiences. Another important thing is to figure out who we actually want to put the time and energy and resources into attracting.

So many marketing dollars are wasted trying to attract customers that are not going to buy your product. There is a huge amount of advertising waste in trying to attract the wrong people. I if I had a dollar for every time a client said to me our customer is just anybody who wants to buy our product or our service, I would be a multi-millionaire.

If I was talking to a home builder and they said well our target market is anybody who wants to build a new home. That is just not true. If we're selling $300,000 houses our target market is totally different to if we're selling $2,000,000 houses.

So, whilst we're choosing how to measure our marketing success by putting metrics in place, if we're leaving our target market wide open how can we possibly measure the success of a campaign? It will always fail.

When we focus on who we are as a brand and what we mean to our target customer we start to define our metrics.
In the next section of the show when we talk about the what, we're going to talk about differentiating marketing the brand and the metrics that we need to use to define the success of marketing the brand as opposed to marketing a product and the difference between the metrics of success in that regard .

Now earlier I asked you to draw 5 circles on a piece of paper and between each circle I asked you to draw a vertical line. The circles represent the stages of the brand journey.
Every brand starts out being unknown. When we start a business it's brand new, no one knows who we are, and we are completely unknown.

We need to go through the process of getting from one stage to the next in order. That order is unknown, known, something, respected and ultimately loved.

The ultimate objective is to get our business or its brand to be loved. But there are barriers to achieving that. Your marketing plan will help you to understand the barriers and should be the plan to get from one stage to the next and break through the barriers to your success. The marketing metrics will define the success of your marketing plan.
 
SEGMENT 3.
What You Need to Know - The What
 
In the first part of the show, I asked why are Marketing Metrics important?
Because, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
In the second part of the show we talked about the brand journey and the difference between marketing a brand and marketing a product.
When we are determining marketing metrics, it is crucial that we understand our objectives.
 
Too often the success of a marketing campaign is defined by how much product we sell.
 
There are so many different variables to whether or not we're going to sell product.
 
Is the product well priced? Is the product something people want? Is the product on sale with our competition at a cheaper price? Is our customer service on point? Is our store accessible? Does the weather lend itself to our product? Is the economy dictating whether or not we sell our product?
 
All of those factors and more can be partially responsible for whether we sell our product or service successfully.
 
With the best marketing campaign in the world, we won't sell product if our customer service is substandard. Well, we might. But you won’t have a return customer.
 
We won't sell product if our competition is selling it cheaper and with better customer service. We won't sell product if the market doesn't need or want the product.
 
If we fail to sell product, does that mean that our marketing campaign was unsuccessful? Not necessarily.
 
If the metric of success is to get people into the store, then the marketing campaign was successful whether we sell product or not. The function of a marketing campaign is to give people enough of a tease to make them want to buy. Whether or not you sell is dependent on many variables.
 
 
So, what do we do now? The first thing we need to determine is who does our brand, product or service currently appeal to. Then we need to figure out who we want our brand, product or service to appeal to.
 
Let's place our brand on the brand journey in terms of our target purchaser.
 
If one of our target markets does not know our brand from a bar of soap but we want them to know us for something, then we tailor a marketing campaign to attract those people to our brand.
 
Example, we work with a chain of men’s fashion retail stores. Their price point is mid-range and their product and service is high quality.
 
They appeal directly to men aged 35 to 65.
 
In that age bracket they are considered to be respected and, in some cases, loved.
 
Now the question we ask is do we want to attract a younger demographic? If we do, we need to do some work because 19-year-old young men sit in the unknown bracket of their brand journey.
 
The question is, is it worth pursuing that demographic to get them to know us?
 
In this particular client's case, we have decided to target the younger demographic around 25 is a perfect age.
 
Why? Because 25-year old men are future 35-year-old men and as the top end of our demographic drops off and stops purchasing, we need to have attracted a younger demographic to come up through the brand journey.
 
The metric of success in this campaign is how many people in the 25 male age demographic who previously did not know us now know us.
 
The key here, is not to try and be all things to all people. We have to determine what is the most important message we want our target to understand.
 
In this case our marketing campaign will not focus on high-end suits. In this case our marketing campaign will most likely focus on urban casual wear.
 
Once our 25-year-old demographic decides the product that we have on offer appeals to them, we will get them in store, we will show them great service and value and they will eventually become a customer of our brand.
 
As they get older, they will start to buy suits.
 
We didn't market suits to them to get them interested in our brand we marketed a different product but once we got them to love our brand, they started to buy the rest of our products.
 
So, the marketing metric in this instance was how many 25-year-old men did we attract to our brand through the sale of a particular product. The long-term success is to take that 25-year-old male on a journey with our brand and eventually get them to love who we are and what we do. But there are stages to that success.
 
That message is going to be different depending on who you are talking to and what your objectives are.
 
 
 
SEGMENT 4.
What You Need to Do​​ - The How
 
In the first part of the show, I asked why are Marketing Metrics important?
Because, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
In the second part of the show we talked about the brand journey and the difference between marketing a brand and marketing a product.

In the third section of the show, we discussed what you need to do in order to determine your marketing metrics and in this the last and final segment, we will talk about how you do all that.

So, we know that marketing metrics are important because you can't manage what you don't measure. We understand about the brand journey and the difference between marketing a brand and marketing a product. And we know that in order to determine our marketing metrics we need to figure out who our target audience is and what we want them to do.

Here are the steps to determining your marketing metrics.

Step 1. Identify your target audience.
There is likely to be more than one but stay focused determine which target audience you're going to approach with this particular campaign.

Step 2. Figure out where they sit on your brand journey.
What stage of the journey do we need to take them from and to? What are the barriers to getting that target audience to the next stage?

Step 3. Understand what your target audience wants to hear.
What is it about your brand that is going to make your target audience want to engage with you? Create campaign content that is going to answer that brief. Develop a communication strategy that is going to most effectively reach your audience.

Step 4. Decide what results do you need to see that will determine your campaign has been successful?
These are your marketing metrics.

How you realistically determine your marketing metrics, will ultimately determine the success of a marketing campaign.
The more specific you can be about who you are trying to talk to and what message you want them to hear, the easier it will be to set realistic marketing metrics.

Here is another example. One of our clients is a national not for profit organisation. This year as we all know has been extremely challenging particularly in Australia where through November and December of last year through summer, we experienced the worst bushfires for many years in Australian history. Closely followed by the bushfires was COVID-19.

Our challenge in such difficult economic times, was to at least equal the fund-raising target set the same time last year. In order to do this, we had to re-evaluate our target audience. In addition, we had to re-evaluate our creative execution.

All of this had to be done during the worst economic times Australia had seen in generations. The challenge was great. By re-evaluating our target market and changing the message that we relayed, we didn’t match the previous year’s target but we tripled it. The target was $220,000 in fundraising. The result ended in a $720,000 fund raising result.

The metric of success in this case, was clear. Match last year’s fundraising target.

How we did that was to understand the target market, talk to them in a language they understood… I heard on one of the shows here on IBGR one of the announcers used an old term I’m familiar with – the old radio station WIIFM – What’s in it for me?
We gave the target market what they needed in order for them to trust our brand and engage with our call to action.
The metrics of success could have been social media engagement, website hits or calls to the organisation. In this case the clear marketing metric was to raise money.

We exceeded our target because we understood the market and gave them what they wanted to hear.
In summary, know your brand, know your objectives, be specific and set the metrics.
Written by Richard Miller

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