This is it. The third and final blog in Swim Creative’s strategic planning series. I assume you curled up with the first two blogs and memorized every word, but in case you need a refresher, the first post was about keeping the plan simple and the second post was about putting it into action. Here, I want to talk a little about measuring.
There are two quotes I want to contrast when it comes to thinking about measuring. One is by Peter Drucker who says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
The other is by Mitch Albom who says, “When you are measuring life, you are not living it.” To me, one is a management-minded reminder to analyze and apply knowledge to improve. The other encourages us to live in the metric-free moment.
Mind and heart. Kind of where marketing lives, don’t you think?
Before your campaign launches, you will need to have objectives and goals identified. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s ok to keep them simple. Just make sure that they are business goals.
Sometimes we geek out about marketing performance goals like impressions, opens and click-through rates (CTRs). Those are important, but we have to remember that we are participants in the solving of business problems.
These goals are related to things like volume, revenue, or market share — also known as key performance indicators (KPIs). This is the marketing mind at work: looking at quantifiable results that guide our decisions and actions going forward.
However, these quantifiable results are the product of consumer behavior. In other words, part of the credit for results needs to be attributed to the emotional connection between a brand and a person.
Why? Because emotional connections turn into a purchases, relationships, loyalty, and ambassadorship. This is the marketing heart at work. This requires the ability to speak in human truths in order to relate to people on an emotional, personal level. This, too, can be measured by utilizing things like surveys and focus groups to help us understand the brand-person relationship.
And then there is the gut factor that simply takes honest and authentic cues from observing and relating to people living life.
So try to measure your campaign both ways: key performance metrics and brand perception/preference metrics. At Swim, we create work that makes people think, feel, and do. It seems that measurement falls into that category as well: put your mind and heart to work measuring and then use that data to do something relevant with it.
Thanks for reading this series on strategic planning!
We hope this series was helpful. If you have more questions about strategic marketing planning, creative execution, measurement or all of the above, send me a message.
More on analytics, recorded at the Google HQ Hangout Studio: