I came across an article from 2005 called "Don't Blame the Metrics" a couple of days ago. Six years later, it still rings so true I had to laugh. The upshot is this: According to a recent (at the time) survey by the CMO Council, the majority of marketing executives are dissatisfied with their companies' ability to measure marketing and social media ROI. Despite the increasing availability of tools to help them link their campaigns to the bottom line, most CMOs also said they aren't using meaningful metrics to track their success.
If you've spent any time on digital and especially social media marketing, this should sound very familiar. "Our Facebook page is working! We just don't have the right metrics to prove it!" In fact, the data shows quite the opposite. Remember, this is from 2005, pre-financial crisis, pre-Facebook explosion, pre-Twitter. I can't imagine it's gotten any better:
"The effectiveness of marketing is disappointing and getting worse. For over a decade, Copernicus Marketing Consulting has collected performance data on more than 500 marketing programs for consumer and B2B products and services. The firm has found that 84% of these programs are decidedly second-rate, resulting in declining brand equity and market share. Customer satisfaction averages just 74%; most acquisition efforts fail to reach breakeven; no more than 10% of new products succeed; most sales promotions are unprofitable; and advertising ROI is below 4%.
It's not that you have bad metrics. It's that your marketing sucks. And it has probably sucked for quite awhile, but you can measure it now and of course that's going to be depressing. It's depressing, but it's also liberating, because it means you don't have to bury yourself in data-driven hell to be a good marketer. I don't mean to discount the importance of metrics at all, but good marketing isn't about spending hours wading through complex measurement tools in search of the right metrics to prove to your boss that finally - finally! - your marketing programs are working.
It's much simpler and much harder than that: Your marketing has to be better.
I realize that's not a tremendous insight, but it's one of those ideas that gets thrown around a lot and hardly ever acted on. So when I say you need better marketing, here's what I don't mean: I don't mean sprucing up your Facebook page, tweeting more often, getting more blog comments, bringing in more short-term leads, having snazzier creative, collecting even more data about your customers to perform creepy behavioral retargeting or any of the things you've been doing in the past.
Here are some of the things I do mean:
- Help people become better at something.
- Inspire people to take part in your cause.
- When you do suck, admit it and make it better.
- Bring people together to solve a problem.
- Just try to be helpful.
It's not rocket science. It's simply about creating tangible, meaningful value in the lives of your customers. And really, it's about more than just marketing, because if the rest of your business is focused on meaning, the marketing will follow.