Viper Marketing & Communications Group

Marketing Multiplier - moving on from vanity metrics

Author: Neil Wilkins

Neil learnt his marketing with the likes of Orange, NatWest, BP Castrol and Ordnance Survey and now helps individuals and businesses to communicate more effectively. He trains and mentors marketers on professional Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications through to post-graduate level.

Sometimes it's better to take a little time than rush into the obvious.

Never has this been more true than in setting out objectives and measures for your sales and marketing activities.

The easiest things to measure are often irrelevant. We call these 'vanity metrics': visitors to your website, the number of Twitter followers, impressions on a Facebook posting, the circulation figures for a magazine in which you have an article.... the list goes on.

Why are these things pointless? Because less might be more. If the numbers are large they are likely to include people who have no real interest in you, your products and services. Awareness is pointless if it doesn't result in a positive action or a 'sale'.

A Marketing Multiplier gets you thinking about the real deal, the places where you can make a difference to your highest priority customers, the ones who will help you deliver proper value and return on investment.

It's all about your customer journey. The step by step process along which you are guiding your customer in your communications. The trick is to measure the effectiveness of each and every communication point in terms of how much trust and commitment you score in the eyes of your customer. Trust and commitment equates to real engagement and that has some value points.

At key moments in the customer journey (especially where the customer makes a decision, acts upon a call to action, or enters into a transaction) the value points accumulate. Plot the value of each of those key moments in terms of how much it contributes to the overall journey and multiply up by a weighting of your top priority customers or customer segments. 

The result will be a customer journey that shows where the most important points are for each top priority customer and how you are actually performing in their eyes. 

That is real marketing measurement and you'll never worry about vanity metrics again.

If none of this makes any sense then drop us a line and we'll talk you through it in return for a good coffee.

- Posted on Friday 26 Aug 2011 at 16:55 by Neil Wilkins

Tags: marketing metrics (2), marketing multiplier (1), roi (7), vanity metrics (1)