“Is that good?”
It’s not a phrase you want to hear after you’ve spent 10-15mins walking through a few marketing slides that you’ve spent multiple hours creating to report on a recent campaign or initiative.
However, it’s one that I’ve heard a few times in my marketing career in that exact situation and it caught me by complete surprise. In compiling all of what I thought was the necessary data – in communicating what I felt like were all the necessary points – I had somehow failed in my connotation or context to convey that this is in fact good news.
It’s a strange feeling.
It first feels like, “I really overprepared for this meeting” and also a bit of “Why was I just talking for 15 minutes if that didn’t come across?”
Both of which feel like wasted time and energy.
All of us, regardless of our area of expertise, can make the mistake of being too close to our work that we forget to share the proper context with an external audience. It’s finding that fine line between sharing too much about the subject that people go, “Yeah, we know what it is” to “What are we looking at here?”
Marketers sharing digital marketing results
For marketers especially, we can get lost in sharing metrics that are familiar to us in our day-to-day while the CFO waits patiently to see a metric that has a dollar sign before it. I think one of the most common examples could come from email marketing. Share email marketing metrics with anyone for the first time and see how they respond to the open rate percentage.
It doesn’t matter what the number is, if you say it with a flat tone they’re going to ask, “Is that good?”. Or maybe they won’t because they’re too shy to ask the question but they’ll be relying on your context to understand if it is or not.
(In case you didn’t know, Hubspot would say that the average open rate is 22.5%.)
The same is true with CTR (clickthrough rate) and CTOR (click to open rate) – both of which are normally a small percentage that people immediately question.
Your most important metric could be different depending on what you’re most focused on within your digital strategy and digital marketing tactics. It can be fun to share the big numbers, but there’s power in the smaller ones that are directly linked to action.
Be direct – your tone isn’t enough
When I’ve gotten the question, “Is that good?” I’ve realized it has to do with the assumption that my positive and excited tone would be enough to convey that the metrics were in fact good.
However, if you’re like me, you might just be a naturally positive and excited person when talking about all things marketing or digital marketing strategy.
So people are going to struggle to discern where the real win is and if your presentation is meant to share the results of a recent campaign, activation, promotion, etc. then that’s not good enough.
Additionally, if it all sounds the same, people might wonder if they’re only being shown one side of the coin – the good side – and not the things that potentially went wrong.
Be direct. Help people see exactly what went as planned and what was unexpected or potentially fell short of expectations. By holding yourself accountable to the results – good and bad – you create trust within your team and/or the working relationship with your client.
No campaign is going to be perfect. However, sharing the mistakes creates an environment of accountability for all and a better chance of you and your team not making the same mistakes twice.
Marketing results are not instant. What looks like progress to one can look like a failure to another.
We all want results faster.
I know I do when I can see so clearly that we have the right digital marketing strategy but we just need more time to generate awareness.
Or we’re close to cracking the code for converting more visitors to customers.
Or that we have the right strategy but we’re lacking the proper investment in content.
There are so many components that contribute to a successful marketing strategy and the weight of one versus another depends on the brand’s goals, stage, and budget amongst many other elements.
Depending on those elements and what scenario they create – like extreme growth goals versus the budget is drying up – small steps of progress can be exciting to some and viewed as ‘not fast enough’ by others.
Or even a failure.
Truly a glass-half-full or half-empty scenario.
Marketing requires patience and consistency. No matter what the scenario, it’s unrealistic to expect instant results. Additionally, it’s unfair to ignore steps of progress.
Think more about building and investing when you think about your marketing efforts and strategy. Those words bring to mind a much more realistic timeline; they embrace the reality that you will be doing this piece by piece.
Not to mention it makes things a lot more fun. It helps you see where you’re winning.
Everyone wants to know if they’re winning
In the end, I think the question “Is that good?” can come up so often when sharing marketing results because of two things: 1) it can seem like there are a lot of ways to keep score and 2) everyone wants to know if they’re winning.
It seems like there are a lot of ways to keep score
The right digital strategy means that it is aligned with your business goals. That’s the score on the scoreboard you’re wanting to see when time runs out (this year, three years from now, or maybe just this quarter).
But along the way you will share impressions, open rates, visitors, new users, ROAS, ROI, conversion rate, win rate, clicks, views, reach, followers, adoption, leads, qualified leads…..you get it.
Those can feel like other scoreboards you want to share.
But those make up the stat sheet and depending on what game you're playing (i.e. industry you’re in) some of them are more important than others. If you understand that then you will know the proper context to share your marketing results.
If your business does not have a common or clear goal, then there’s a good chance that it will all feel important (and at times pointless) because you’re chasing a large vague goal like “We just need to keep growing.”
Push for a scoreboard with leadership if you don’t have one. Maybe you’re the one that would create it. Take the time to do it. At first, it might feel a bit arbitrary in terms of what you set as your goal, but we all need it to know if we’re winning.
Everyone wants to know if they’re winning
It’s part of what’s underneath the question “Is that good?”.
As a business aligned to a common goal gets to work, we all want to know if we’re winning.
It’s the reflex to look up at the scoreboard before the quarter runs out to see how things are panning out by fans and players alike.
As you share marketing results, keep the focus on the scoreboard. Use the stat sheet (remember that’s all the other metrics) as supporting material, but not the headline. It will give people a better chance to recognize if your company is winning or not and it will help you show that even if the company is down a few points, there could be some all-star play taking place within different marketing functions or tactics.
Good luck sharing your next round of results!
Need help building a digital marketing strategy or creating your business’s scoreboard? I’m here to help. Check out my services here.
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