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It is 2021, and measurement is more of a moving target than ever. The industry, platforms, and content are all in flux.
Lets take a look at recent data points we’ve seen:
– 87% of ad execs say they hold back spending on media and platforms due to poor measurement. – MediaPost
– Half of the marketers in this survey discard at least half of their data. – eMarketer
– Centralizing marketing data remains a top priority with 48.1% of marketers wanting to dissolve the silos. – eMarketer
New norms are being created every day. I’ve pulled together a summary and framework for how we’re thinking about it, in the hope it can help ground and provide some direction.
They all bring new meaning to the old saying from Wannamaker:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.
This is what he said 100 years ago, that’s when media wasn’t always visible, you couldn’t tell if someone read the mailer you sent them. The trouble is in 2020, the outputs are visible, I can see that ad but the consumption can be invisible.
This works as a content marketing measurement framework, there are five key layers to the measurement problem:
The end goal being transparency and accountability. Knowing that our message is seen, heard and they take action.
The world’s leading brands use Nudge to create better content. Explore our platform.
1. Metrics and measuring the right things the right way.
In the early days of the internet, we visited homepages, clicked around, and left. We didn’t even have tabs, iPhones, or social sharing. It was in this context that Google bought Urchin to form Google Analytics.
That was the old way. Now we live in a multi-tab, multi-device, multi-format world. Content is delivered to our customers seamlessly and on-demand. Users are blind to banner ads.
To stand out, brands have shifted to content, and content goes where the consumer goes. As a philosophical idea, content doesn’t care where it lives, it cares where it is consumed.
And that core shift is why what we measure and how we measure it has to change. It’s content first, disparate environments and all about attention. The one true metric in 2021.
2. Unification of disparate content data and distributing it.
If content lives on the WSJ or NYTimes, your content hub or your social pages, each has a different measurement system, methodology, and their own incentives. Each platform is incentivized to tell their story. Not your story.
And who keeps them in check? Simple mistakes can escalate. And who pays for that? You. By unifying, you stay in the driver’s seat, taking control.
Unifying all these metrics enables you to understand how content can and will drive your strategic objectives. Letting you invest smarter than ever before.
3. Insights generated from this data to make it actionable.
We’re beginning to see marketers and their teams drown from information overload. How can we collect, interpret, and action the right data? Just because we have more data, does it mean we should use it?
Simplifying this around the specific objectives you are trying to achieve, and then deriving insights. It’s not about data-driven decision making it’s about data assisted decision making. They’re close but not the same, in one data feels doctoral in the latter it’s supporting the experience, contextual awareness, and understanding that isn’t always reflected in the data.
Data should be actionable, it should be delivered in a way that your teams can understand it. Data should be diplomatic, not autocratic.
4. Benchmarks to compare relative ROI.
Benchmarks are wonderful things and yield a lot of value in a fast-moving world. They provide the yardstick to anchor and demonstrate progress.
Benchmarks help understand your relative ROI, good benchmarks articulate what return you get relative to your peers, your industry, and your prior investments.
Good benchmarks act as a form of attribution when full attribution isn’t achievable. Benchmarks help remove friction in the creative process and give freedom to your teams. Good content, right audience, and solid benchmarks= a great job. Please continue.
5. Attribution to identify strategic ROI.
Attribution is the holy grail, we all know it. Every CMO drops it at trade talks. Yet we know that it isn’t as simple as that. Everything communicates, integrated strategies work, and help all boats rise with the tide.
Where attribution is most underutilized is understanding how actions drive the strategic objectives. Attribution to the objective is the name of the game.
This enables you to articulate your own ROI against your objectives which are never fully just about sales. If only business were that simple.
6. Our shared goal: transparency and accountability. Knowing that our message is seen, heard and they take action.
This is the measurement problem for marketers today. In an environment shifting to content, this simple framework provides a path to best in class but even the implementation of one or two steps helps you navigate.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Whether we are winning or not, if we don’t measure it we won’t know. This has to be the utmost importance for marketers, getting to transparency, and accountability.
Your team needs the worlds’ best dashboard and real-time intelligence to make data assisted decisions against key objectives.
Real life use cases of how Nudge addresses this
A finance brand on-boarded with Nudge was able to use the benchmarks to identify that they were 80% below their peers. This provided laser focus for their team on how they could improve.
A technology brand unified their video data, to find where they got the best return on attention. From social, to open web to their own channels. This focused their efforts and ROI considerably.
A travel brand had worked with celebrities to create content at an immense expense. Despite heavy promotion, it wasn’t shifting the dial. Using Nudge they found what parts of the content most resonated with users and were able to adjust instantly.
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