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Some of us love numbers, Some of us don’t. We might be capable with numbers, but maybe data isn’t the thing that drives us. Maybe we’re more people-focused. Heads of Marketing and CMOs come to marketing from a variety of directions – sometimes it’s highly technical areas like SEO and PPC, sometimes it’s up through product marketing, or even PR (like me).
This results in senior marketers with different levels of comfort with numbers. And then you get the CEOs – they can come from anywhere. You might have an engineer CEO who doesn’t believe marketing is real, you might have a CEO who used to be in sales, who believes sales are the only thing that matters. You might even have a CEO who used to be CMO, which is probably the hardest of all, because they DEFINITELY think they could do your job better than you.
Whatever permutation the Head of Marketing/CEO relationship has, it’s the marketer’s job to justify what marketing does and the budget spent. And that comes down to data (ie numbers). The amount of data available in digital marketing can be overwhelming, but in other areas, it can be challenging to get – measuring the true impact of brand marketing on the bottom line has always been hard. So how do you strike that balance? Here are some ways of approaching it, without getting overwhelmed by spreadsheets.
Get aligned with the CEO and everyone else on the big picture business goals
First, step back from marketing and take a look at the bottom line goals. Despite what some people may think, marketing isn’t there just to make things look pretty or people feel good. It has a strategic business function to serve the overall business. If it doesn’t, it is the waste of money that engineers often believe. If you can pinpoint the business goals you’re serving, you can make your case more easily about how the work you’ve done is helping to reach those goals.
Track your customers from start to finish – not just when they get handed over to sales
The secret about marketing is that isn’t not just about lead generation. Sure, that’s the bit everyone wants to focus on – how can we grow – but good marketing impacts the whole of the customer journey, including sales, and customer support once they’re a customer. So if you start tracking your prospects/customers across the length of that journey, you can start to show how specific initiatives have impacted different parts of customer journey. It will also help identify your weak points – where are prospects/customers dropping off and why.
Focus on trends over time rather than discrete time periods
Different marketing tactics have an impact over different periods of time. For some, like pay-per-click, you might start to see results soon. For others, like content marketing, it can take a long time. And if you take your eye off that blog series you put up, you might just miss the fact that it really started to take off six months after it was posted. Of course, the other tricky thing is that the impacts of marketing are cumulative, so sometimes it’s hard to identify what exactly caused the change – which is why we need trends over time. Showing steady improvement over time is powerful.
Don’t focus on the nitty gritty in high level conversation – just what matters.
If you have a CEO who loves the numbers, don’t let them go down a rabbit hole. If your CEO has the attention span of a goldfish, don’t bore them with lots of details. Present only the metrics that will show them progress, and how you’re supporting business goals. For example, don’t talk about click-through rates for emails, talk instead about how the email sequences you’ve been using to nurture prospects have shortened the sales cycle or brought in more leads that month.
Never only measure what’s working – it will bite you in the end
We’re all under pressure to perform. We all want to look like we’re doing a good job. And the temptation to make the data look good is always strong. But sometimes that “bad” result will be the canary in the goldmine that makes you shift your strategy, rather than throwing good money after bad. As long as that data is correctly interpreted (the magic part), it can be a powerful indicator for what to do next.
As anyone who is watching organic traffic on a website this year can tell you, SEO is not for the faint of heart. Changes to the algorithm, the introduction of AI – all of this makes life harder for those who have been relying on organic traffic. And while it’s important to stick to the principles of good online content, your results may also be telling you that it’s time to consider other ways of driving traffic to your website. And that’s important to know.
Ultimately, like anything, Keep. It. Simple. Stupid. It can be tempting to get lost in a quagmire of data and acronyms, but try to focus on the essential business goals, and you’ll avoid getting lost in vanity metrics.
I'm beta-testing a CMO coaching offering at the moment and I'm playing around with the name "CMO School" (I love the cheesiness). If you're interested in helping me test out this concept, get in touch - georgina@crabapplecomms.com
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