Marketing experts talk about conversions all the time. If you happen to pass by a sales/marketing department, you will hear words such as open rates, reshares, click through, and leads. These are all examples of data that tell the outcome of a marketing campaign in question.
Have you ever thought, if data is the only way to measure your marketing efforts? Well, the answer is no. There are plenty of intangibles that also indicate how well a campaign is performing. These intangibles mostly indicate what value your business is offering to its customers.
Wondering what these intangibles are? Have a look:
1: Customer Engagement
Of course, there are several tools and even social media platforms themselves give you analytics about the posts, their reach, number of likes, share, and more. But ignore that hard data for a bit and spend some time reading the comments on each post. I would suggest every business owner from marketing staffing agency to eCommerce store owners and even bloggers to do this.
What are your visitors talking about in these comments? When they reshare your posts, does it add any extra value? If the customer is engaging in a way that it’s adding value to your business, this is an indication your marketing efforts are working.
2: Customer Persona Fit
No matter what type of product or service you are selling, the first step is to identify ideal customers. Many organizations create customer profiles to fill potential attributes. These include the budget of the customer, their likes, demographics, and other relevant data.
The next step is to create a customer persona. It helps the marketing team remember their audience and craft marketing messages according to their taste. Let’s assume you have already established customer persona. An intangible way of measuring the results of your marketing efforts is to measure how aligned that persona is with the customer who walks through the door or shops online.
Is the customer interested in your products? Do your offerings address their pain points? Are they able to afford your products or services? If the customer acts similar to the persona created, it’s plain to see you are on the right track. But if not, you need to rethink your marketing efforts.
3: Brand Awareness
Before purchasing a product, buyers tend to do far more research than they did in the past. They don’t just dig up information on the product but the company as well. How well do your customers know about your company would tell you if your marketing efforts are being fruitful?
Strong brand awareness is a profound measure of that. Your customers should know a brief history of your company, the founders involved, they should recognize your logo, tag line, and the unique selling point of your business.
4: Behavioral Change
A change in the behavior of your target audience tells a lot. Depending on the goal of the campaign, see how the behavior of your target audience has altered. Did it change their perception? Did it cause an action or did it drive engagement?
The changed behavior could either be more leads or fewer sales than before. But don’t measure it through data, measure it through the intangibles such as customer perception about your product or service. A simple way to figure that out is to ask a customer to fill a survey form.
5: Measure the Value
Most demand generation teams measure the effectiveness of the campaigns based on the value they brought. How much value did the campaign provide to the prospects as well as the company? For the prospects, did the campaign’s content offer useful information that helped them solve a particular problem? For the team, what did they learn? Can the new findings help your team optimize further campaigns? The answers to these questions explain whether or not the campaign was a success.
6: Return on Investment
Return on investment can be tangible and intangible. Profitable sales revenue is a tangible measure since it involves data. Intangible form of return on investment includes more brand awareness, more engagement, customer loyalty.
Intangible ROI is hard to measure, I agree because it deals with the success of the business, the happiness of employees reduced compliance risks, legal issues, etc. instead of an actual dollar amount.
Summing Up
The purpose of all types of marketing campaigns is to make the business grow, increase sales revenue, and sustain it. It’s similar to employing the best talent acquisition strategies to attract the best candidates and make the business grow.
Unfortunately, businesses these days are so busy playing with data such as web traffic, bounce rate, conversation rate, sales revenue, and so on that they have forgotten about intangibles. These intangibles may not be hardcore, but they indicate the success of your marketing campaign, too. Don’t ignore them, they could be telling a whole different story!
