A pervasive theme of Relevant and Valued is the importance of making all marketing activity accountable. Mark Stevens' Your Marketing Sucks: the hard-nosed guide to implementing ROI marketing is a call-to-arms for those who believe that marketing spend that does not have a quantifiable impact on financial results and on company value, is marketing spend wasted.
Stevens calls his approach Extreme Marketing, which takes as its starting point that if it can't be measured then it should be cancelled. His basic tenet is that 'to be effective, marketing must produce positive arbitrage - that is, it has to generate more dollars than the dollars you invest in it.'
It's a no-nonsense, hard-hitting read, full of uncompromising gems like:
'Not only is it possible to design marketing so that the initiatives and tools you create can generate customer relationships (and ultimately sales), it is near criminal to accept anything less'.
Great content marketing also demands that accountability is built in to the strategy from the outset. By stating measurable goals and objectives upfront as part of your strategy development, it follows that you are more likely to embed measurement in every single campaign.
Defining the point in the customer journey that your marketing is intended to impact, is a useful methodology for achieving accountability. Starting with a definition of the problem in terms of the action that you are trying to get the customer to take will ensure that you build in tools to measure what the customer does in practice. This approach will also help you to choose the medium that best delivers your objectives, by ensuring that not only is it appropriate to the context and informational needs of those you are targeting - but that it also supports a mechanism to track actions taken. If you can't build in usable metrics, then there's no point in running the campaign.
The benefits of this principle are highlighted when you consider the specific stages in the customer journey defined in Content marketing tactics and when to use them:
- ACQUIRE --- select a medium that enables you to clearly track how many 'strangers' you persuade to give you permission to start a marketing relationship with them as a percentage of those you initially target. Downloadable White Papers are a great example of this. You can measure the number of people who visit the web page against the number that download the Paper or, if integrated into an e-marketing campaign: the number that download as a percentage of those you have mailed.
- CONVERT ---conversion metrics are of course essential in any online or direct marketing environment. Defining a clear call-to-action, you need to know how many have taken it as a proportion of the total prospects. A telemarketing campaign that follows up those who have downloaded the White Paper is an example.
- RETAIN AND GROW --- when the prospect becomes a customer, many marketers forget the importance of measuring the value of the ongoing relationship. But investing in existing relationships is often more profitable than driving new ones. What the content marketer needs to know here is the impact on lifetime customer value or on repeat purchases of the ongoing content marketing engagement. So if you're producing a custom magazine, you need to ensure that you understand the consequences of the subsequent action taken by your reader as a result of interacting with that content. Track this through your CRM, build clear calls to action into the content and measure specific outcomes that way.
- RECRUIT AND AMPLIFY --- if you're asking an existing customer to help you recruit other customers, then the medium you use needs to build in a tracking mechanism to help you quantify the success of that objective. The content here could be either the incentive or a way of promoting the benefit of recruitment. For example, if your content is viewed as of specifically high value, you could reward an existing customer with a free subscription, free book or access to premium content in return for their success in signing up a new customer or prospect. Alternatively, you could use a simple discount reward and faciliate this through your existing content marketing relationship to sell the benefit of participation. Either way, you should link the outcome back to the marketing that drove it. As the best medium for recruitment and amplification is frequently the Internet, this goal of complete transparency is increasingly simple to achieve.
Many of us will recognize the refrain: 'it's impossible to measure but... [delete as applicable] anecdotally we know it makes a difference/if we don't spend the money this year, we'll lose it next year/we have to do it because that's what our competitors do.'
Mark Stevens' Extreme Marketing suggests that this is woolly thinking. If you can't prove it adds value then it probably destroys it.
Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.
www.relevantandvalued.com
