Understanding Metrics - Part Four

Reading Between the Lines

Making the Hard Facts and Fuzzy Feelings of Metrics Meaningful in Marketing and Sales Campaigns

Completing the Metrics Journey

For the last three posts, we’ve been working on ways to improve our marketing and sales by actively gathering data, analyzing it and making decisions that increase revenue. The new world of marketing metrics is rapidly changing but for now we’ll suspend our metrics journey by taking a look at two types of data packages – Quantitative the performing of an action, and Qualitative why they took the action.

Numbers Verses Words

Marketing metrics data can be broken down into two types:

• Quantitative, which can be equated to an action, like the number of clicks or views. This is the type of data YouTube uses to determine if a video is really “viral.”
• The other type is qualitative, or the “why,” the video has gone “viral.” It is encapsulated in the comment block and spells out the viewer’s feelings. This is the data that leads to the customer journey, and social media platforms, like Facebook, offer an easy way to get it.

Facebooking

Social media platforms offer great ways to track both quantitative and qualitative data. Let’s look at Facebook for an example:

• Say you want to do a little brand marketing or pay for clicks, to increase leads and you want to measure the success of your effort. The number of Facebook post “views,” “likes” and “comments” can be tracked as quantitative data. The content of the comments, people’s feelings about your posts, and conversations between themselves, are your qualitative data.

Metric Conversion:It’s all about the Customer Journey

So let’s say your data set from your Facebook campaign looks like this:

• Views: 1,000 – So these folks saw what was going on – Names
•  Likes: 100 – These people are curious – Leads
• Comments 15 (10 unique visitors) – These people are interested (in the case of positive comments) – Suspects

The Facebook tally stands at 100 leads you can start a conversation with, but more importantly, 10 quality Suspects that have already started conversations, and are just waiting for more interaction on their way to becoming prospects for your goods and services.  

A crafty businessperson would take the next step and create Customer Centricity, where customers comment and post on your behalf. This rewrites the “How to Make Sales,” book.  You and I can talk till we are out of breath about how great our products and services are – and it won’t hold a candle to a three word post, “I love it,” from one of your customers.

Want to get there?  Go here for the eBook, “Measuring What Matters”

And check out our next post series – Customer Experience - Your Best ROI – it will start April 1st (no fooling).

If you have any questions or just want to know more, let Dave DeVelder, Revenue Strategist at DevCom help you understand what your metrics are saying about your bottom line through expert performance management. He can help create a customer experience that will have your customers singing your praises, buying more from you and referring new ones. Give him a call at 813-758-1772