Measurement Help is on the Way
With increased discussion this year around traditional marketers shifting media budgets online, what remains to be seen is how these marketers will measure their digital spending vis a vis their traditional marketing allocations. In the past, hesitation to shift budgets online has been largely attributed to a lack of commonly accepted ways to measure the impact of online efforts. Tools available to marketers today range from Web analytics programs, to control vs. test measurement, to the more complex Econometric or marketing mix models. Unfortunately, within marketing mix models, companies have continued to struggle with how to incorporate the results of their search, banner advertising, sponsorship, social media, and other interactive programs to establish a reasonable comparison.
It now appears that some progress on this exercise is finally being made. The "Marketing When Customer Equity Matters" article in the Harvard Business Review in May focused on Wachovia Financial's efforts to find an effective, data based method to make the company's marketing spend, including online, more accountable.
Going beyond measuring the short term impact of marketing spend on revenue or unit sales, Wachovia is exciting in that it successfully found a means to value customer equity and to compare everything from traditional to direct and digital media spends.
For those of us concentrating on helping mainly traditional marketers find value in the digital space, one can only hope that the Wachovia example is a sign that times are changing. It would be great to see further successful examples from industries beyond financial services coming to light over the next year - even better if Canadian marketers were driving some of these best in class studies. As the Wachovia article concludes, with the right models in place, marketing dollars spent in digital media can make the shift from being logical based on consumer habits and analytics to being comparable and quantifiable.
