If you’ve ever worked at a marketing agency, this scenario might sound familiar.  There are six weeks to go in your client’s fiscal.  They give you a call with a rush request to help them figure out how to spend their remaining budget for fear of losing it the following year.  The subsequent spending spree involves some sort of one-off media buy, brand activation, or hospitality program.  Maybe it did some good, maybe it didn’t.

This spray-and-pray approach may have served its budget-saving purpose well, but there’s no way of knowing whether it served the business well unless you apply a critical eye afterwards.  Unfortunately, careful post-analysis tends to be the exception rather than the rule, and not just in crunch situations.

Which is ironic.  Have you ever met a CMO who’s said “We don’t care about measurement?”  If you have, I can all but guarantee that he/she wasn’t a CMO for long (besides the fact that most aren’t compared to other C-suiters, anyway).  To not justify their investments in marketing is to not justify the company’s investment in them.

Yet, as much as 90% of these execs recognize they’re not doing all they can to track their efforts, even those spending five, six, seven, all the way up to ten figures on marketing.

It’s not that they’re unmotivated to ensure those dollars are working.  The reality is, many brands think they’re measuring when in fact they’re simply collecting.  To wit:

• 1,500 leads from a week-long promotion seems nice, but how many of those are qualified? What was the conversion rate compared to other programs?
• 20,000 live engagements sounds fantastic, but what was the objective? How does it stack up against what you were expecting for an event like that?
• 10M views/shares/subs/whatever on social is great, but is this an improvement over the same thing last year? Did it exceed typical figures for this type of activation?

These are results.  Results are not measurement.  Without relating them to goals and benchmarks, they’re virtually meaningless no matter how impressive they might sound.

Even worse, they’re ripe for all kinds of (mis)interpretation.  It’s the context behind results that turns basic numbers into usable metrics allowing for a clearcut story.

Now, this isn’t to say that measurement’s a breeze.  Some forms are easier than others to implement.  For instance, direct response communications are highly precise and testable.

In other cases, causality can be quite challenging to pinpoint.  Take sponsorship for example.  Who knows if it was the LED signage, halftime video, or branded booth in the fan zone—or any of them at all—that inspired Suzie Spectator to choose Red Bull on her next visit to Kroger?

It’s still doable, though.  Even something as sophisticated as a multi-million-dollar sponsorship campaign is measurable if you have the right system in place.  A system, by the way, that doesn’t need to drain your resources since much of it involves information you’re probably already collecting.

So, what does this look like?  Measurement takes various forms, but effective plans all follow the same general steps.

Gain Stakeholder Buy-In

Is measurement important to the business or not?  If so, then everyone responsible for its success must be committed.  Measurement is cross-functional and could involve any number of participants in the chain:

• Marketing managers tracking metrics
• Sales teams reporting new business
• R&D analyzing data
• Agencies handling partner requests
• Leadership making decisions based on real-time results

Establish Goals

At the risk of stating the obvious, this must happen up front.  Otherwise, what’s the point?  Determine what you’re trying to achieve and why it’s important for your business.  This could include:

• Generating awareness as a startup
• Expanding membership in a new market
• Increasing online or offline visitor traffic
• Raising brand favorability versus competitors
• Converting leads to achieve targeted ROI

Collect Benchmarks

Here’s where that context comes into play.  Measurement by definition requires a starting point.  No matter what you’re evaluating, you can find control data:

• Current market and/or proprietary metrics
• Results from the previous program
• Results from other marketing programs with the same audience
• Industry averages
• YOY sales in that target market

Align on Process

Timelines.  Roles.  Methodology.  The actual infrastructure and execution must be laid out cleanly so that everyone knows what’s expected.  It’s infinitely easier to do things like mining data as you go than to backtrack at the end to fill gaps.  Then, once everything’s in hand, having an agreed-upon model already in place legitimizes the results and accelerates the finish.

SO, clients, instead of hurrying to get rid of your bottom dollar before fiscal’s end, it helps to gauge what you already did spend.  Proving that what you’ve done moves the needle is the best way to keep—if not increase—that budget of yours next year.

And to keep your agency partners sane for those last few weeks as well.

In the second part of this two-part series, I’ll walk through a measurement plan my team and I put together for a brand that was heavily invested sports sponsorship.  As mentioned, this is one of the more complex marketing platforms to assess, but when you break it down into its component parts, it’s very manageable…and very effective.

Go to Part 2.