Cast the first stone who has never celebrated the number of followers on Instagram or the number of likes in a post on Facebook. Scotland Email List These numbers enchant us! But we know they are far from proving and marketing effectiveness.
We often call these numbers vanity metrics. They even help to understand if the contents are going well or not, but they serve more to inflate the ego. They do not say, therefore, if the marketing strategies are working and bringing results for the brand.
That’s why we need to talk more about marketing effectiveness. This perspective of evaluating strategies puts all the focus on achieving the objectives to understand if marketing did the right thing and achieved the best possible result . In this article, you’ll better understand what marketing effectiveness is and why it’s important to evaluate your strategies with that insight.
What is marketing effectiveness
Marketing effectiveness shows whether marketing strategies have achieved the best results for the brand .
To better understand what marketing effectiveness is, let’s go back to Portuguese classes and talk about the meaning of the words effectiveness and efficiency . For many people, they are the same thing, but there are subtle differences that have big impacts on marketing management.
In administration, it means using all available resources to deliver the best possible result. Therefore, effectiveness focuses on the quality of delivery (emphasis on ends).
Efficiency, on the other hand, is doing things in the best way possible. In administration, it means optimizing resources to do more with less. So, what matters for efficiency is the process yield (emphasis on means).
Of course, both perspectives are important to marketing. After all, no one wants to extrapolate spending to achieve results, but reducing costs without achieving the goals is not good either.
Therefore, when we talk about being effective and efficient together, we are talking about being effective, which means having the best possible result with fewer resources.
However, marketing management often needs to make choices . At certain times, effectiveness must be the focus. In others, what matters most is efficiency.
When effectiveness is the focus, marketing must maximize resources to ensure the best quality in delivery. Realize that the focus is on increasing earnings , not exactly saving resources.
And, when measuring whether marketing was really effective, it is the strategy’s success indicators that must be evaluated. Later, you will better understand how to make this measurement.
How important is marketing effectiveness?
A survey in the United States showed that of small businesses don’t know if their marketing efforts are effective, and 12% say they don’t have results with them.
Do you know what that means? There are a lot of companies out there that are throwing money out the window by not measuring their results or simply investing in strategies that do not pay off.
Understanding marketing effectiveness means knowing if your investments are on track to achieve your goals . In other words, it means taking care of your money and your business.
In the past, marketers used to shoot in the dark anyway. After all, the information they had from TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and billboards was the profile of the audience and an estimate of the vehicle’s reach. But they would never know how many people actually saw the ad or bought a product from it.
Digital channels, in turn, revolutionize the power to measure results. Everything can be tracked and measured: views, clicks, conversions, return on investment, etc. So you can see exactly what results an ad or a campaign has achieved.
Therefore, those who do not measure the effectiveness of their strategies are currently wasting one of the great advantages of Digital Marketing .
From this measurement, it is possible to evaluate the marketing efforts and understand if they achieved the objectives. More than that, you understand if the strategies are contributing to the growth of the business .
How to measure marketing effectiveness
Measuring marketing effectiveness requires you to look at the right metrics. We are talking not only about putting vanity metrics aside, but also prioritizing outcome indicators over those that consider the costs of the strategy.
Once again, we return to the difference between effectiveness and efficiency to explain which metrics you should consider.
Efficiency metrics measure resource optimization, that is, how much you are cutting costs or making investments pay off. The Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC), the Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Return on Investment (ROI) are some examples.
However, remember that effectiveness is not cost-focused. Therefore, effectiveness metrics measure the achievement of results, that is, how much the strategies are contributing to reach the marketing objectives . Realize that they are not directly related to costs, as is the case with efficiency metrics, but to the quality of delivery.
Delivery quality
The focus of effectiveness is the ends. Therefore, an effective strategy needs to deliver the best possible outcome for the organization. The path may not be the fastest or the most economical, but the result needs to be excellent.
Effective strategies must exploit all available resources and opportunities to deliver the best results List Provider . The focus is not on saving or reducing the intent here is to maximize profits .
You can only be effective in marketing if you have a strategy with planning. Without setting goals and targets, you don’t even know what results your marketing is supposed to achieve.
Without defining indicators, you also can’t determine if you’ve gotten where you’d like. So an effective strategy presupposes these definitions.
Marketing effectiveness also depends on the quality of the data that informs decisions. They are used to evaluate strategies and direct future efforts and investments.
So marketers need to be confident that the data they use is accurate, up-to-date, and reliable and can drive strategy intelligence .
