Program Goals and Marketing Objectives

I've been thinking this week about metrics for the marketing and communications function of my organization. Specifically, what's the best way to measure the contribution of our marketing efforts in the achievement of our program goals?

Maybe I need to explain that. In my organization there are program goals. We want to recruit new members. We want to increase the number of members attending our conferences. We want more members to volunteer their support for our workforce development programs.

In order to help achieve those goals, we engage in a variety of different marketing activities. We deliver information about our association and its benefits to our membership prospects. We populate our weekly e-newsletter with information about our conferences. We solicit members at those conference to become volunteers.

Holding these marketing activities up to the metric of the program goal seems wrong. In other words, if we fail to increase the number of members attending a particular conference, while having populated the weekly e-newsletter with information about that conference, we shouldn't say that the marketing activity failed because the program goal wasn't reached. There should be some other metric, some other objective that we can set that will measure the success of the marketing activity.

Following this logic typically leads an organization to what I call activity rather than outcome metrics. In this example, an increased number of members at the conference is the outcome we're seeking, so measuring that is an outcome metric. One of the activities we engage in to achieve that outcome is placing a promotional article in each week's e-newsletter. Publishing articles is not the outcome we seek, it is an activity that we believe will lead us to the outcome, so measuring how many articles we publish is an activity, not an outcomes, metric.

One problem I often see is a conflation of these outcome and activity metrics -- that measuring the success of an activity that supports the outcome becomes the same thing as measuring the success of the outcome. As a result, the organization is question quickly finds itself in the "business" of publishing articles. Substantial attention is paid and rewards begin to be offered, not to increasing conference attendance, but to publishing articles in the e-newsletter. "What else do you expect us to do?" an executive might hear once this mindset has taken over. "We published more articles in our e-newsletter than we ever have before!"

Avoiding this problem is what I've been thinking about this week. One way might be to focus attention not on the volume of the marketing activity that is taking place, but on the effectiveness of the marketing activity in delivering its message to the intended audience. In other words, stop counting how many articles you publish, and start tracking (and driving up) how many members click on the link in each article that takes them to your conference's registration page.

This should not only give the marketing department of your organization marketing objectives to hit (i.e., we need to increase our click-through rates on published articles about our conference), but, by focusing these objectives on improving the effectiveness of your marketing activities, you should be increasing marketing's overall contribution to achieving the program goal itself.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://www.formaliti.com/measuring-success/