Marketing can be a great career, especially for people who like to measure things and come up with acronyms for those metrics. CTR, CTO, CPM, CPC, LTV, CPA, shares, likes, views, the list goes on and on. Why all this obsession with measurement? Pretty simple really, it all comes down to dollars. If you spend a dollar on marketing, you want to earn, at minimum a dollar in revenue. These metrics allow you to track, compare, and report performance.
At least, that is the hope. It is too easy for marketers to get lost in the minutia, spending countless hours optimizing for more clicks, opens, and shares. This quest for optimization can cause marketers to lose perspective about the most important metric of all: how many people have converted into paying customers? Without this measurement, the others are moot.
The savvy marketer seeks one thing above all others, it is their holy grail: attribution. Which activity was responsible for motivating the purchase? You'd think that should be an easy question to answer, especially in the digital age. However, the truth of the matter is that consumers take many different paths to purchase. If you’re using multi-channel marketing, then it’s very dangerous to over-emphasize any single channel or a metric within that channel. Ideally, they all work together for a positive result.
If you’re looking to perfect a single piece of marketing content, such as an email or a display ad, then you need to use metrics like open-rate and click-through-rate. But these are the most effective when they form part of a deliberate testing program — what is called A/B or split-testing (referring to the process of splitting an audience and sending different content to the various groups). Granular metrics are essential tools for the marketer who is zeroing in on a compelling offer or distinctive campaign.
Once you’ve identified a compelling offer and the right way to present it, you deploy it to the channels where your target audience is most likely to see or hear it. This is when granular metrics begin to lose their efficacy. There are just too many moving pieces and variables to monitor. Although, without the proper data integrations, you’ll still spend a lot of time puzzling together the consumer journey from platforms that don’t talk to each other. That’s where the right technology partner makes all the difference, by helping to automate successful campaigns and provide actionable reporting.
What you need is the ability to accumulate data from the various channels where your advertising appears and discern the true impact on your bottom line. For community financial institutions, the most critical metric of all is account opening. All the click-throughs in the world won’t get you any closer to your goals if people don’t convert from curious consumers into account holders.
Relying on granular metrics to drive your marketing efforts is the equivalent of steering your car while staring at the road immediately in front of you. You’ll waste lots of time and energy correcting for small changes, instead of staying focused on the horizon. When you tap into the power of cumulative performance reporting, built on a foundation of proven campaigns, you’re able to maintain a much more consistent, profitable result. That’s why at Kasasa we’ve designed an always-on, multi-channel marketing platform that seamlessly integrates with your in-house data and automates your success.