New way to measure marcom and PR?
How to measure marketing communications (beyond lead gen) or PR (beyond "hits") seems like a question that’s never really answered in a way that executives or marketing and PR professionals feel good about. I’d like to propose an alternative.
Empirical evidence shows that two questions on teacher evaluations correlate with independent measures of student learning, according to Ken Bain, author of "What the Best College Teachers Do."
- Did the professor help you learn?
- Did the professor stimulate your interest in the subject?
Now apply this to marketing or corporate communications:
- Did the PR/marketing professional (or conference/speech/Web site/podcast/article) help you learn more about the company?
- Did the PR/marketing professional (or tactic) stimulate your interest in the company/category/product/issue?
Understanding and interest have to be in place before people make a decision to act, whether that action is calling to set up a meeting with a sales rep or buying the product.
These seem like more informative measures than web hits, clips, white paper downloads…and much less expensive than some of the complex measurement approaches that companies often put in place to measure marcom and PR.
Too simple? Maybe. But when I think of my favorite professors and my best experiences buying from B2B and B2C companies, they would all score off the chart on those two questions.
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February 6th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Interesting idea, Lois. Measurement is of course endlessly frustrating for marketing and PR. Partly, as you suggest, this is because there is so much ’stuff’ to measure but much less clarity on what really matters, and partly it’s because there remains an even larger disconnect on what marketers might think is important and what the CEO and other top business execs really care about. Your two questions fit nicely with the move to more conversational and pull marketing, and the understanding that we’re often dealing with a long, deliberative sales cycle which requires marketers to carefully cultivate buyer interest over time. It might even be a more compelling approach for the CEO!
Even with your suggestion, though, there would remain the sticky question of how exactly to do the measurement. You could rely on surveys of customers and other influencers, although that’s a difficult and potentially expensive approach to do well. I suppose you could come up with proxies for the second question to measure if the marcom initiative stimulated interest, but then you’re right back to looking at web hits, downloads, etc.
So, I like the approach, but we may need some more work on how to make it practical. What do you think?
February 11th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Rob:
After thinking about the post, I agree that it’s too soft. I’m intrigued that more and more companies are buying into Fred Reicheld’s one question — "Would you recommend this product/company to others?" as a measure of customer loyalty. Simple. Powerful. What then, could be an equally simple and powerful one question measure to assess all the marketing and sales activities designed for customer acquisition? Maybe that’s still being too simplistic.
But I like measuring outcomes or behaviors that connect to business drivers more than measures like clicks, downloads, awareness, etc.
One of Foghound’s goals for 2007 is to develop more predictive and valuable ways to measure conversational marketing. If it doesn’t connect to the business agenda, there’s no reason for businesses to adopt this approach.
Lois