Beyond the CTR: Why marketing intelligence must align with real business outcomes
With uncertainty still plaguing Australia and New Zealand’s economy, data and marketing intelligence is more important than ever before to build back business confidence. A panel of experts, including Tourism New Zealand’s Sarah Britton and 3Forward co-founder Steve Jones, explain how marketers can win back renewed confidence - both in themselves and within their business as a whole.
Tourism New Zealand has had a big challenge on its hands over the past 12 months, being forced to pivot its strategy towards domestic tourism as a result of COVID-19 travel restrictions, while still maintaining a strong international brand presence for when things eventually return to normal.
Speaking during Salesforce’s recent Finding Greater Confidence Through Marketing Intelligence webinar in partnership with Mumbrella Bespoke, Sarah Britton, global manager of digital analytics at Tourism New Zealand, explained: “We didn’t have a lot of data [about local tourists] at our disposal, so it was really trying to pull together any bits of insight that we could find and then standing up some tests as quickly as we could. When you’re pulling data from different sources, with government data, website data, and marketing data, you have to have a platform that can build out as much insight as you can find.”
In amongst all this uncertainty, automation has been a key factor in keeping the entire team informed and aware of any rapid changes. “We’re a small digital analytics team supporting multiple marketing teams around the globe,” Britton told the audience. “We don’t have the resources to be producing the insights and reports for every campaign, so it’s about how we automate a lot of those dashboards.
“Bringing all of those data sources together within Datorama is really going to help us going forward when borders start reopening again so that all of our marketing teams can jump in and interpret how the marketing campaigns are being affected.
For 3Forward co-founder Steve Jones, who was also on the panel, COVID-19 has reinforced the need for marketing spend to result in genuine business outcomes. When it comes to setting up a measurement framework, one of the most common mistakes is to avoid factoring in these real business outcomes in favour of vanity metrics, explained Jones.
“An agency will typically put an interim step of website conversions or vanity metrics, but while they do tell a certain story, there’s no real guarantee that it actually turns into a business outcome,” he said.
Marketers should be wary of focusing solely on metrics such as click-through rate, because “once that CTR becomes a target to hit, it loses its business benefit.” The reason? Once you’re optimising for as many clicks as possible, you lose sight of whether there’s a downstream benefit to that click.
Plus, metrics such as click-through rate are easily misinterpreted. He gives the example of a nursing home looking to target people in Bondi. They find people searching for things to do in Bondi, and place an ad on a page titled ‘what do your favourite Baywatch celebrities look like now?’ “On those types of experiences with mobile phones, when you want to see the picture of David Hasselhoff, just as you’re about to scroll, the page moves and you accidentally click on the ad,” he said. “That’s a wasted click, but the demand side platform interprets that as ‘I’m getting clicks on this page.’ So not only are you wasting money, but you also have a new insight that people who live in Bondi and are interested in Baywatch have an affinity for aged care.”
Britton agreed, adding: “There will always be those key media metrics that the media agencies are working towards, but it’s about making sure that we can connect them up to our key business outcomes. How do you layer that up so it means more than a click-through rate?’”
No matter how marketers choose to define their KPIs, they can’t make any effective changes without having their first-party data in order. “The only way to scale insights and prove actual business performance is through better governance and ownership of first-party data,” said Jones. “I don’t think a business can grow customer databases through aggregated data sources or third party data sources that are unknown.
“Once you really have that understanding of every touchpoint your current customer base is exposed to, and how to get that, it’s about building out those data science capabilities in house or investing in a data warehouse that allows you to perform advanced modelling, or work with your agency who has that,” he said.
Britton concluded that while you can always prepare ahead for some changes, “there are other changes that you just don’t see coming at all, like COVID-19. How do you stay agile and able to adapt to a situation like that? It’s about making sure that all of your data is all sorted and having insights available and ready to use.”
To see the full discussion on how to combine marketing intelligence with real business outcomes, click here to watch.
CONTENT SPONSORED BY Salesforce Datorama
