You’ve made your 2015 marketing resolutions now get on and deliver against your new hopes, dreams and aspirations. Offices across the UK need to see this as an opportunity to turn over a new leaf, set sights on a more productive, proactive and- most importantly- profitable 12 months in 2015, and leave time-wasting behaviour behind for good – including your efforts at measurement. Or suffer the consequences.
Britain’s economic recovery was never going to happen overnight, and there is still a long way to go (not least if the Eurozone’s mass quantitative easing fails to get the continentals buying again). Nevertheless, overall growth has once again become a reality, and this is being felt in marketing and public relations just as much as any other sector. According to the IPA Bellweather Report, published earlier this month, budgets for marketing have been revised up for the eighth consecutive quarter, and are now at their third highest level since the survey began, circa 2000.
So as you plan your marketing spend, make sure you know WHAT you should be measuring and how you’re gong to do it. Especially when it comes to PR and social media marketing. We know from experience these are the areas that many in-house marketers fell less confident about.
Long gone are the days when any self respecting public relations professional should be talking about AVEs (advertising value equivalents) or simply talking about that most vague of objectives ‘awareness’.
Robust and commercially aligned measurement should now be the norm.
It’s what we do. And win awards for. How else do we know that our work has effectively changed the way audiences think, feel and act in relation to our clients?
Three examples include:
*Our Cook With Kids campaign for Persil Washing Up Liquid resulted in 86% of mums involved with the campaign now more likely to buy the brand.
*Driving 120,000 user sessions to Silentnight’s website during the key pre Christmas trading period, meanwhile revealing that 75% of consumers agreed that we’d achieved our brief of making the brand the UK’s sleep expert.
*Delivering a 7:1 commercial ROI is helping deliver tangible inroads to Magnet Trade’s commercial plans
So a buoyant, positive trading environment, low inflation and the signs that wages are finally beginning to increase as many items in the Retail Price Index fall, are helping to fuel demand for campaigns designed to sell products to people and other firms. So those willing to take affirmative action will be rewarded- if not immediately then in due course.
Effective measurement is not alway easy and sometimes clients ask is it worth it? In the paraphrased words of Danny Dyer in Football Factory, albeit sans expletives: “‘Course it was???. Just look at our performance on behalf of clients to evidence how much we achieved, bolstering our reputation for ingenious public relations, and boosting our inbound referrals for new business, whilst making a measurable difference to their business.