My friend Katie Paine, aka the Measurement Queen, helps companies track the effectiveness of their efforts. That’s a very important thing. It’s nice to know where your money is getting the best return.
She linked to an article on PRWeek titled “Most marcomms pros can’t prove value of their work, research finds.”
The article says “Two in three PR and marketing professionals … are unable to demonstrate that their work helps their business or client, new data suggests.”
Half of the people they surveyed believe that job cuts would have been less likely if these professionals could “better prove the commercial relevance of their work.”
I see two important lessons in this.
Marketing pros need to learn how to measure what can be measured. The article makes it sound as if people simply aren’t doing their homework and availing themselves of appropriate tools. That needs to stop. Where measurement is possible, measure.
We all need to realize that not everything that has value can be measured.
We’re so used to computers and spreadsheets and attribution and such that sometimes we get the false impression that everything should have an ROI.
What’s the ROI of going to an industry conference? You can measure some things, like how many people visited your booth, or how many new leads you got, but there’s a lot more value that you can’t measure. Simply having the name of your company associated with a certain industry or topic has value, but you can’t put a number on that.
It’s hard to measure the ROI of a press release, but press releases are important.
A lot of advertising can’t be precisely measured. Take a billboard, or a bus bench ad. You might be able to get some idea of how effective it is by comparing sales in neighborhoods where you have them versus where you don’t, but that’s pretty squishy.
This presents a big management challenge, especially during hard times. The inclination is to cut all those expenses where you can’t demonstrate ROI. But just because you can’t demonstrate it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. In fact, it’s very likely that the things you can’t measure are affecting the things you can. If you cut all the things you can’t measure very well, the things you can measure will likely decline as well.
Attribution often carries with it this strange idea that you can draw a line between a marketing or advertising effort and an action, as if this phone call, this email, this web ad, this social media post led to this sale.
Very few things work like that. People need to hear things many times before they stick.
How many times have you had a conversation where someone mentions a product, and you say, “Yeah, I keep hearing about that. Maybe I should check it out.” Then three days later you get an email for that product and you click through.
Which of these many influences got you to click? It’s a little presumptuous to try to answer that question.
Having said all that, you need to have some sensible means of deciding where to put your money. You can’t just toss up your hands and say “who knows?” and throw your ad money to the wind.
So definitely learn to measure what you can measure, but don’t take attribution too seriously. Remember that it’s rarely a one to one thing.
Links
Most marcomms pros can’t prove value of their work, research finds
