Having built a lot of campaigns and measurement plans to support those campaigns in my 15 years doing marketing, I’ve landed at my measurement philosophy. Which I want to share with you: Keep asking why you’re doing something until you hit the core business reason… what is the reason.
We want 100million impressions. Why? So more people see our content. Why? So we're top of mind when they need what we sell. Why? So we win more business.
This series of “why” is doing a few things:
Probably the most important, is that it ensures whatever we’re doing is actually valuable to the business. The number of times I’ve worked with a client and they’re drawing blanks after the first why would stun you. I often ask, who’s paying for this and what are their KPIs. What is the reason? It should be driving sales, shifting brand perception, increasing talent retention. It can’t just be about driving views because views aren’t inherently valuable. That’s a metric that means nothing without context. We need to justify that the work we’re about to put into the project is actually meaningful and worth the effort. If we can’t get to a good business reason, then scrap it and do something that is.
It helps us simplify. The exercise helps us articulate value. Meaning we have to prioritize to make it to the end. The number of briefs I’ve seen with like 15 KPIs. That’s fine to have 15 metrics, like let’s measure it all, but we can’t define success across 15 metrics. That’s too all over the place and will have us building the most spastic, discombobulated campaign or experience. So prioritization and simplification are key when figuring out what’s measurable. I love a clean 1 big, primary KPI that drives the strategy with a few secondary that refine the direction, execution, and creative. If you’re doing it all, you’re likely not going to do really do anything.
It’s also helping us understand the measurable funnel… these are the steps that we need to measure to understand our impact. And if there’s not a clean metric that we can use or if there’s no way to actually measure it, then we have to pivot. I’ve often had the tough conversation of, yeah sorry if we aren’t going to do a survey after this campaign to understand it’s impact on brand perception, then why are we making lift of brand perception a goal? We won’t actually know that answer. What is the reason?
