Aligning myself with the words of my CTO, Chris’s theme of “What gets measured gets improved”, I decided to write my thoughts on managing performance in digital marketing. There are plenty of quantitative metrics that measure the performance of any campaign, or any initiative that a business undertakes. Yet, many metrics are sugar-coated “vanity” metrics, that make the effect of marketing beautiful, but, move you further away from your original objective.
Thus, it is important to ask ourselves some basic questions:
What is it we are trying to achieve? Why are we undertaking this campaign or action? What does success look like?
Taking a deeper look into the indicators of success and what matters to the short, medium, and long term sustainability of the organization is essential. This begs the question — what do we do to avoid getting stuck in the rut of vanity metrics?
To understand model building, we start with setting the right goals, whether they be company-oriented (share of market, sales, conversions) or customer-oriented (loyalty, NPS, sentiment analysis), before we define the results of every goal. Understanding how to reach Key Performance Indicators for the results we want to achieve within a set time frame is then required to measure organizational performance.
The growth path of consumers in the traditional era goes from “Awareness” to “Attitude” to “Act” and to “Re-Act”. We used to describe the phenomenon of decline of consumers in the process as a “funnel”.
In the digital era, consumers come together in groups instead of acting as independent individuals. The act of purchasing thus has evolved from B2C to group-to-group. The group effect triggered by the links inside these consumer communities, in turn, generates a profound influence on the growth path of consumers. The growth path of the consumers has now evolved as such:
- Awareness
- Appeal
- Ask
- Act
- Advocate
It is therefore important for brands today in the digital age to build metrics based on the loyalty loop, where consumers no longer get pushed through a funnel, but get cycled through the digital engagement cycle, and become advocates and repurchasers of a brand’s product(s).
Examples of Key Performance Indicators that may be relevant will include:
- Frequency of Mentions
- Traffic
- Average Order Value
- Cart Abandonment
- ROI of Promotions
- Customer Churn Rate
- Net Promoter Score
- Analysis of Customer Emotions
- Time to Resolve Customer Issues
In the age of digital, merely converting a sale is far from where the objectives should be. Most importantly, we should endeavor to create a virtuous cycle of sharing, interaction, and advocacy, where consumers become part of our brands. Reach out to Supercharge Lab and see how we can help you – chat with Anne here.
By Anne Cheng