Driving progress towards clear goals can take your brand to a higher level.
I remember the first time a client admitted, “I’m not sure that we know what success looks like.” Sales and profits at his high-end home brand were solid. But as he geared up for the next marketing campaign, he was justifiably concerned about demonstrating success. He wasn’t necessarily as worried about measuring results as he was about measuring the right results.
I thought about that story recently when I came across a piece by Bill Gates about the approach his foundation utilizes to track results: “setting clear goals, choosing an approach, measuring results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach.”
Marketers can dramatically benefit by adhering to this straightforward process. Of course you want to drive your company’s top-line sales and bottom-line profits. But these metrics are often influenced by a variety of internal and external forces beyond your control. So perhaps you should consider additional ways to measure marketing success – both near-term and long-term. Here are a few ideas:
Demonstrate that your advertising is working harder. Marketers continue to track their advertising with tried-and-true tools such as Vista. It’s important to know when your creative is outperforming the competition, because it can tell you what needs to be dialed-up or dialed-back in your messaging.
Show how you improve satisfaction. I know of a company in a home-related category that tracked 12 successive quarters of increasing customer satisfaction. Why is this important? One study demonstrated that if all companies in their category were equally effective, their collective earnings would be $5 billion higher.
Correlate your “Digital IQ” with financial performance. The consulting firm L2 measures strengths and weaknesses of high-end brands using 675 data points across all forms of digital, social and mobile – correlating the ability of brands to engage consumers with the resulting positive effect on a company’s financial performance.
Don’t neglect building brand equity over the long haul. Analytics don’t always have to be measured in real time. BrandEconomics tracks the multi-year increase in brand strength for several high-end home brands. Their research demonstrates that companies with the strongest brands have an intangible value of 250% of annual sales compared to the rest of the pack.
Ask yourself: Have we set a clear goal for marketing? What approach will we take to meet that goal? How might we measure results on an ongoing basis? And how will we use those measurements to continually refine our approach? No matter what category you’re in, setting clear goals and tracking results will help take your brand to a higher level of performance.
