Publisher: SullivanPerkins | Series: SPotlight
Does Your Digital Marketing Measure Up?
In a survey of 50 CFOs in the US made by Viant in 2018, more than a third of the respondents complained that the digital marketing for their organization was measured in what might be called “vanity metrics” – click through rates or video views, for example – rather than in sales revenue, which is the outcome that matters most. For that reason, more than a third of the CFOs saw digital marketing as a cost center, not a profit center.
When digital marketing fails to increase revenue, and doesn’t even measure revenue as an outcome, CFOs and CEOs are justly dissatisfied.
Chart: Concerns About Digital Marketing According to US CFOs/CMOs, March 2018 (% of respondents)
Source: Viant, “Closing the CMO-CFO Digital Divide” conducted by Censuswide, May 21, 2018 / eMarketer.com
- Seen as a cost center, not a profit center: 38%
- Measured in vanity metrics (e.g., metrics that make them look good): 36%
- The team doesn’t measure success in terms of concrete outcomes (e.g., sales): 22%
- Don’t trust them to show the full picture of successes vs. failures: 16%
The dissatisfaction with digital marketing that doesn’t produce meaningful, measurable and desired results has long applied to traditional marketing tactics, typified in American retailer John Wannamaker’s classic quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”
There Are Two Kinds of Customers
There are customers who are already looking for what you are selling. Those are sales you can make and measure using the digital tactics of pay-per-click advertising or search engine marketing.
But there are many more potential customers you need to pursue, and you must use the right message to create or reveal to them their desire for your product or service.
These can be seen as two different customers, or the same customer at different stages of the path toward a purchase.
1. The Customer Who Is Looking for You
Here, depending on the demographic, the primary tactics will be digital – businesses will use pay-per-click strategies, with a focus on Google AdWords, so your business is found online when a customer searches for your product or service. The KPIs are clear – a managed PPC campaign will produce calls, signups or requests for service via email, and, if you are engaged in ecommerce, sales revenue that can be measured to establish ROI.
2. The Customer You Are Pursuing
Here, the deeper requirement is to understand what motivates someone to take the step you want taken – to sign up, to purchase.
Most selling concentrates on providing reasons to buy – on features and benefits of the product, or on cost. But those messages may be the least effective, because although they appeal to rational thinking, they don’t impact the emotional, often unconscious motivations that control behavior.
Pull quote: “Whether you realize it or not, every decision that you make, you make unconsciously, before you even realize you have made it, and so do your clients and customers. If your branding, visual and verbal, speaks to the unconscious part of decision-making, you can triple the sales from your marketing.”
Brain diagram labels: Emotion (largest driver), Process, Logic.
Caption: Learn how people really make decisions.
Driving Increased Sales
Marketing is meant to increase sales. In fact, nothing else matters. This is a truth that applies to products and services, or to non-profit organizations or political campaigns as well.
Creative work that generates spectacle but not sales is irrelevant.
Your challenge is to uncover the message and tactics that will persuade your potential customers to buy, as well as the proven methods that will help those already looking for what you sell to find your business and transact with you.
Results cannot be measured in any way except sales. Marketing isn’t only a matter of better targeting, which big data claims it can do; it is most of all a matter of causing potential buyers to act. That is, to buy.
SullivanPerkins has extensive experience developing digital marketing campaigns that increase sales, along with traditional marketing materials that push potential customers forward on the journey to the sale.
For a Case Study detailing a digital campaign that produced a 200+% ROI for the B2B division of a national retailer, please contact [email protected].