Food For Thought – measuring success
Gauging campaign success is part of every great marketers toolkit. However, determining what and how to measure can look a lot differently depending on who you’re talking to, what vertical they’re communicating to, who their target audience is and what they’re trying to accomplish. If you don’t fall into this bucket, there’s no time like the present to get started.
When determining how to allocate your marketing budget, it’s a whole lot easier when you have measured past campaigns and spend against predefined metrics. If not, you can back into metrics by first building out the classic OGST(M) framework.
- O – Objectives
- G – Goals
- S – Strategies
- T – Tactics
- M – Metrics
Think first about what your high-level Objectives are. Write them down. These Objectives are in turn supported by Goals. What Goals are set that support your Objectives? Write them down. After setting Goals, you can begin to list out all Strategies that you will implement to help you reach your Goals. Write them down.
Now, here’s where a lot of marketers actually begin: Tactics. Tactics are really meant to support Strategies, which in turn support Goals, which in turn support the overall Objectives of your organization. A tactic may be “post 3x per week on Facebook”. However, if deciding a Tactic based on “this is what we’ve always done”, or “this is what our competition is doing” is your methodology, you should pause long enough to determine what the tactic actually supports. It may very well support a Strategy and you can greenlight it. But if it doesn’t, perhaps it should be scrapped, or altered. Once Tactics are determined, you can decide how you would like to measure their effectiveness. It may be that a metric of success is that a project was liked by management. A social media campaign may have multiple metrics that are measured, such as engagement, newsletter sign ups, or even target revenue.
Once you have developed the OGSTM framework, you’ll need to allocate budget to each line item to determine what tactics your budget will support (or how much budget you’ll need to ask for to accomplish everything on your plan). Another benefit of this is to help you negotiate an increased budget or help senior leadership understand what you can accomplish and what it will take to reach the company’s Objectives.