The ultimate guide to understanding Marketing effectiveness
“By measuring marketing effectiveness you are able to track how the sum of all activities comes together to make or break a brand. “
We are experiencing a data-hype within marketing, however this has come with a focus on what has been easy to measure (short term sales activation) which has led to long term brand building being neglected. Even though long term brand building is proven to give more loyal customers, a more sustainable brand and even larger sales.
To combat this the measure of marketing effectiveness has come to light to measure the impact of marketing communications strategies on the brand as a whole.
By measuring effectiveness you are able to track how the sum of all activities comes together to make or break a brand.
For true marketers what this means is that you can continue making memorable brand building marketing communications while also being able to prove your worth in numbers in front of short sighted company boards and nervous clients.
Source: Les Binet & Peter Field
So how do you actually measure marketing effectiveness in a well… an effective way?
Marketing and effectiveness pioneers such as Les Binet and Peter Fields have devoted their time to studying the relation between effectiveness and our digital age’s vast bank of online data. They found that effectiveness can be directly linked to search behavior and volume as well as the sentiment of what is being said of brand and in what amount.
We interpreted theirs and many more’s findings into these key measurements for you to follow:
Share of search: To what degree is a brand’s marketing communication creating interest relative to their competitors?
Share of search has been determined by marketing academia as well as Google themselves as an effective measurement of market share in a digital age.
How is this possible? Two parts: first, people who wish to purchase your product/service search for it online, therefore any demand-generating marketing initiative should lead to an increase in your share of search. Secondly, share of search also takes into account your current customers as people are more likely to want information on something they already have "(if you own an Apple laptop, you’re more likely to ask questions about it").
Share of earned media: To what degree is a brand’s marketing communication resulting in an increase in people talking about your brand in relation to your competitors?
So does this mean if people talk about my brand that more people will buy from me?
Well yes and no. Les Binet says that: “‘The brands that people talk about most on social media are the ones they’re least likely to buy”. For example, in the car market the brands that people talk about most are expensive luxury brands: Porsche, Ferrari, Lotus.
People don’t talk about Ford very much on social media, and certainly not Kia or Hyundai, but those are the brands they buy.’
However, what we do know is that share of earned media is proof of creative marketing communications.
This is built on the assumption that creative marketing communications leads to more people talking about said brand
Search and sentiment trend:
The problem with only measuring share of search and share of earned media is that it doesn’t take into account anomalies such as scandals and viral breakthroughs, Volkswagen would be deemed to have a huge spike in their market share as both people were searching and discussing Volkswagen quite radically during the 2015 emission scandal whereas we know that this was no positive event for them.
To be able to neutralize these types of anomalies Search and Sentiment trend has been developed by My Telescope. The index is an aggregate of search volume, social media & media sentiment, and volume of mentions.
By aggregating share of search and share of earned media and weighing this curve with the sentiment of what was being said about the company we became able to more accurately measure the long and short of brand building and marketing communications effectiveness.
Source My Telescope