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Marketing Return on Investment: Why Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story

With the growth of social media marketing, an emphasis on quantitative metrics to measure marketing effectiveness has grown, too. Because online marketing gathers statistics so easily and so exhaustively, it has become common to define campaign success according to the number of Shares, Likes, Follows and such. Agencies cite these metrics as a meaningful indication that the marketing they created is working.

I disagree. The only true metric of marketing success is your bottom line. Did the person who Liked, Followed and Shared actually buy anything? Did they even click on the link to your site? Can you make a clear connection between a lot of Likes and a jump in sales?

Social media is great for public relations and raising awareness, but it has failed as a useful means for marketing. A study conducted by Forrester Research reported that “among a brand’s fans, only .07% — that’s 7 in ten thousand — ever engage with the brand’s Facebook posts. On Twitter the number is even lower — 3 in ten thousand.” The visitors to these pages aren’t even clicking through, much less buying.

So using this kind of math to prove the success of a marketing effort is misleading at best, and dangerously misguided at worst. The 2010 Pepsi Refresh campaign is a good example. (Read about it here.)

I believe this is because the job of marketing is to inspire purchasing choices in its audiences, and that requires more than a compilation of statistics – it requires an understanding of human behavior. Even children know that marketing depends on timing, presentation and the ability to be persuasive in order to be successful. (“Mom, can I stay up till ten tonight? Pleeeeeeeze?”) When you have to rely on human choices to meet your goals, you are entering the realm of emotion. Tying success solely to logic and numbers will never tell the whole story.

This is evident when reading marketing how-to books. They’ll tell you that in order to close a sale, you have to connect with or “touch” the prospect anywhere from five to 27 times through various media. This is because each prospect will need a different number of encounters with your product or service to feel comfortable making a purchase.

But since everyone is different, how can you know exactly at which of the 5-27 points of contact any given prospect decided to pull the trigger? Unless you are targeting individuals one by one, you simply can’t. You also will not know which of the several marketing media you used has worked in any specific instance. You can track some of your sales through tools such as coupons, discounts and time limits, but these aren’t appropriate for all businesses, especially services. You could try surveys, but often people don’t remember the exact moment they decided to buy or what the trigger was.

So we are back to the pre-Facebook mode of serial testing. How it works: you develop a clear understanding of your target market, including their general preferences for getting information, and then you choose several means of communicating your offer to this group based on that understanding. Since different people look at different media at different times in different emotional modes, you will choose a range of marketing media, not one, and deploy them in a systematic way over time, not once, so you can plot general sales results against them.

As you continue your marketing program, you will hone your sense of what works best through looking at your sales, not a bunch of numbers that show how well your Facebook page is doing. That is more of a measure of success for Mr. Zuckerberg than for you. Taking the time to create and execute a marketing program based on thoughtful consideration of your market instead of raw numbers has a much greater chance of success.

What Graphic Designers REALLY Do (and it’s not art)

Clients new to buying graphic design are often confused about what they should expect from the work they’re buying. Sometimes all they have is a vague notion that they’re going to get little pictures about what they sell, and that these pictures should be attractive so people will look at them. They tend to associate this process with art, and may think that design and art are the same thing.

This is understandable since both art and design are visual. But their functions are completely different.

When asked some years ago what the difference was, Milton Glaser (an icon of contemporary design) said something like this: the function of art is to intensify one’s perception of reality and create new languages of meaning. But the function of design is to communicate, and for that we must use known symbols.

Coming from a fine art academic background, I had been trying to figure out how art and design are related. I now had my answer. It has helped me understand the difference between artistic goals and design goals, and that I will be both a better artist and a better designer by staying clear about which is which and not confusing them.

This understanding has also kept me from becoming one of those dreaded stereotypes of the commercial art world: prima donna designers who disregard their clients’ ideas, insist they know best, and work in the vacuum of their own ego. To them I say: listening to your client is not a sell-out. It’s the only way you can create effective work. Work that is not effective is a failure, no matter how cool it is.

Here’s my take: it is the job of graphic design to combine words and pictures to create an image that will inspire a particular behavior. Specifically, I am supposed to create communications that will motivate people to behave in ways that benefits my clients. Usually that means “Buy my stuff.” It can also mean “Buy into my social cause” or “Vote for me.” What designers REALLY do is nothing more nor less than behavior modification. Designers are all closet Skinnerian psychologists.

I have found that this viewpoint helps clients understand what they are really buying, and gives them a benchmark for evaluating its usefulness. This in turn helps me do better work because they are able to give me better direction.

So the difference is: Design puts aesthetic expression at the service of the client, not the creator. And when good communication exists between clients and designers, the communication between clients and their markets will be much more successful.

One Way to Do Branding Badly

Time for more about branding, one of my favorite subjects. This time we’re hearing from the Pet Peeve Department.

As Design Deli’s faithful readers know, branding is the sum of all contacts and impressions an audience has with a company or organization.

A brand embodies the promises that a company makes to its market in terms of what to expect from it. These promises are communicated symbolically in the brand’s visual identity. If purposeful decisions are not made in creating and managing a brand, a vacuum forms which the company’s audience will fill with whatever assumptions come to mind. These haphazard perceptions are rarely to the company’s benefit.

An amateurish, poorly conceived brand identity presents its owner as unprofessional and does not inspire confidence. In fact, it creates the opposite, to the detriment of its owner.

One way to ensure that your brand identity will be at best ineffective, and at worst negative marketing, is to hold a logo contest.

Logo contests are to brands as FSBOs (For Sale By Owner) are to home sales. Like representing yourself in court, they are always a bad idea. Logo contests are usually undertaken to save money and to “get the community involved.” That makes as much sense as having a contest to see who gets to do your taxes or take out your tonsils. Design is a profession, not an artsy hobby.

Logos are strategic tools that support business and organizational goals. A cute little graphic cannot perform the functions of a thoughtfully developed symbol in communicating the promise of what your market wants from you. Here are three reasons why logo contests are a sure fail:

Developing an effective logo requires a lot of effort on the part of the client as well as the designer. Without a fully engaged client, the designer is working in a vacuum. Since there is little or no designer-client interaction in a logo contest, results are doomed because the best work happens when a trained designer and a thoughtful, engaged client function together as a team. That doesn’t happen in a logo contest.
Contests attract non-professionals who have no clue about the function of logos, their role in branding or the process by which visual branding is developed.
Contests are also exploitative. They ask a lot of people to work for nothing on the chance of maybe winning a prize. This disrespects everyone involved.

In the long run, contests are more expensive than a professional process because the results are rarely useable or applicable across all media. Entries are often thinly disguised rip-offs of others’ work, especially in on-line contests. This can raise unpleasant copyright issues.

Cost is not the highest measure of effectiveness or worth. Logo contests may seem cheap, but the most expensive logo is the one that doesn’t do its job.

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