Metrics are a marketer’s best friend, and they come in useful when we’re trying to tie campaigns back to an overall return on investment. They also help us to determine whether our marketing efforts are having an impact on the company’s bottom line or not, ultimately guiding the direction that our marketing efforts take and helping us to allocate budgets and resources.
The problem is that if we rely on metrics too much, we can start to lose sight of the bigger picture. A great example of this comes to us via WebCertain.TV, which posts regular social media marketing news updates to its YouTube channel. They monitored the metrics and saw that the amount of traffic that they received from YouTube didn’t make the investment worthwhile. Then, when they stopped creating the videos, they received a huge drop in direct traffic that reappeared again when they went back to creating videos.
Metrics don’t lie, but they can be misleading and they can also be interpreted in different ways. That’s why while it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your metrics, you also need to know when to ignore them and to go with your gut.
When to Say No
This might sound counterintuitive, especially when marketers are so data-focussed, but you need to know when to go with your gut. After all, data is nothing without context, and your marketing team knows more about your company than most. There’s no shortage of examples of companies making changes based on data and then facing a backlash, and sometimes we just have to hold our hands up and listen to our customers.
The same is true when it comes to marketing. Sometimes it’s the stuff that has the most marginal impact on your metrics that ends up meaning the most to your customers. For example, if you’re running a social media campaign that’s all about education, you might not see huge amounts of interaction or pick up any sales, but to the people you help it makes all of the difference.
Your approach to marketing needs to bring together a mixture of metrics and human insight. Instead of being dictated by the metrics, the metrics should provide guidance but always come second to common sense. It’s a little bit like driving with a satnav. It makes sense to follow it right up the point that it sends you driving into the sea.
Conclusion
Ultimately, there’s a reason why metrics are a marketer’s best friend, and we’re not saying that they don’t deserve their place in your toolkit. You just need to make sure that you don’t fall into the pitfall of focusing only on the metrics at the expense of what your customers actually want. The good news is that you can get a feel for what people like and what they don’t like by listening to the chatter on social networking sites – or simply by asking them. When you get it right, you’ll know it. Good luck.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.