Do you know if your marketing efforts are really paying off?
As a marketing leader, you’re facing incredible disruption from every angle:
- The explosion of devices, channels, platforms, and data has radically changed how, when, and where you need to interact with your customers.
- Customers want personalized, meaningful, relevant, and consistent connections with your brand – every time.
- CX leaders (think Amazon, Apple and Starbucks) that may not even be in your industry are setting a tremendously high bar that customers now expect you to meet.
- Loyal customers will now leave you in a heartbeat after just one bad experience.
- The business expects you to demonstrate clear ROI for just about every marketing dollar you spend.
At the same time, your success in the digital age is tied to your ability to create and execute a strong content marketing program that delivers a GREAT, personalized and consistent customer experience – across channels and devices, 24×7.
No pressure, right?
The Vanity Metrics: Marketing Performance Analytics That Don’t Work
No doubt you’ve put numerous solutions in place to help reach this goal. But do you know if those investments are truly paying off?
Forrester Research found that “59% of B2C marketers in North America report that their organization doesn’t know or is unsure what an effective successful content marketing program looks like.”
How is that possible? It comes down to insight, or really, a lack of insight. Measuring marketing performance has become incredibly complicated. Traditional methods and strategies (e.g. click-through rates and impressions) have been exposed as “vanity metrics”, and by themselves don’t give marketers the level of insight they need to thrive in a real-time, dynamic digital economy.
For example, marketers are:
- Measuring performance like individual puzzle pieces, unable to fit them into a full picture that makes sense
- Working off of yesterday’s data (or older) so they don’t have the actionable information needed to continuously optimize operations and campaigns
- Lack the level of detail required to understand how all their online and offline tactics work together to create a conversion
Forrester also says, “Marketers must let go [these] vanity-based metrics…and embrace metrics that clearly link marketing success to business value.”
So, today’s marketers need a far more sophisticated approach to performance measurement, one that gives them the ability to measure their entire marketing mix so they can understand, optimize, replicate, and demonstrate true ROI.
The Three Steps to Effective Marketing Performance metrics
Like so many things in the digital age, performance measurement requires a new approach. Forrester says this change necessitates marketers to adopt both a new mindset and new technology.
“Marketers must change their attitude toward measurement: away from passively reviewing post-campaign reports and toward actively analyzing those past results to guide future plans. To make this shift, B2C marketers must embrace unified marketing measurement — an approach that uses big data and statistical analysis to credit marketing initiatives across touchpoints — combined with predictive analytics to inform prospective marketing plans.”
So, how can marketers move from traditional, passive forms of measurement to this unified approach that enables both short and long-term data-driven decisioning?
Step One: Identify the Right Marketing Performance Analytics
The first step is to make sure you are measuring the right marketing performance analytics, including:
- Budget: Marketing planning, budgets, and financials
- Work: Activities, resources, agencies, and project management
- Content: Consumption, production, spend, and content analytics
- Channel: Campaigns, community, fund usage, and lead status
- Performance: Predictive, forecasted, and current ROI
Step Two: Use Digital Performance Analytics to Collect Data and Inform Strategy
The second step is to use a performance analytics solution that can aggregate and analyze all this internal content & production and external performance data, and then provide detailed marketing metrics across the entire customer journey. With access to a central hub or dashboard, marketing teams can easily visualize operations data to drive efficiency and measure in-flight campaign effectiveness.
Step Three: Use a Real-Time Marketing Performance Analytics Platform
The third step to effective performance measurement is to stay current with your data. With real-time access to operational data, you can continuously optimize spend, internal resources, and content delivery for the best customer experience.
While this shift will require organizational and technology changes, marketers will be able to transform vast amounts of disparate data into clear, actionable insights—insights that enable them to:
- Improve planning and budgeting
- Optimize content, operations, and performance to get higher quality campaigns and experiences out the door faster
- Identify new areas for opportunity to continually “do more with less”
- Prove content marketing efforts are delivering the ROI the business need to compete and win
Learn More
Aprimo’s performance analytics solution, Aprimo Insights, gives marketers the holistic information they need to think and act fast to delight customers and deliver true ROI to your business.
For more information about performance analytics, or to learn more about Aprimo Insights, visit aprimo.com/platform/insights.