Marketers will spend more time and money trying to measure digital marketing than actually developing a great online brand experience. Is it time to just acknowledge is part of your brand and stop trying to measure every digital marketing tactic?
According to Radium One “84% of social sharing, websites, content, is now done on the dark web via email and instant messaging”. While this might be good news for brands, marketers, who are being held more accountable, have to show that the money they spend is driving brand objectives.
To many brands the web is a black hole of budget dollars and little return. Recent research indicates that as much as 95% of online ad traffic may be from BOTS and organic reach of social media is nonexistent. Rather than accept the fact that digital is part of any brand marketers spend countless hours and time trying to measure what can’t be measured all the time. If I see a new ice cream flavor from Haagen Dazs via an online ad I’m not going to click on it, I’m just going to buy it the next time I go to the grocery store. However, banners are measured by click thru rates that show that 98% of people don’t click on them.
You need social media to listen and to give customers a feedback mechanism to contact you. Branded websites are still the best and first tactic for conversion. Online ad, with offline ads, does raise awareness, better than offline ads alone. Why can’t marketers just accept that?
I had a client a while back that said that his primary metric for all of his marketing was his weekly sales sheet along with the IRI market share report. He said “I can change the shape of each marketing tactic slice of the pie and analyze them every week but I would rather use the time to think about how we can impact our brand”. Good advice?
