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2011
When I was in high school I ran hurdles. Even though I didn’t have legs a mile long (which would be great!) I still loved it. Now, after each race the individual who was clocking you would march straight over to your lane and give you your time. Now, there was one particular race where, for various reasons, I was primarily interested in beating my personal record even more than winning. Problem was, upon finishing the race I was quickly told “you got second!” But as I stood there looking around I began to realize no one was walking my way. I honestly didn’t care that I got second; I was dying to know if I had beat my PR. As you might notice, while there was a measurable being offered to me, it wasn’t the one that I needed or wanted. If you’ve kept up on my blog posts you’ll know I’m a pretty big fan of numbers. Measuring your efforts for dynamite ROI is something I’ll always advocate as a best practice, but there are circumstances when the truth is, numbers don’t matter. Or rather, there are right numbers and there are wrong numbers.
When could numbers possibly be unhelpful? You might be thinking. Consider this – a business wants to build a partnership with you for the primary reason of attracting a target market they recently have shifted a focus towards. Let’s just take Harley Davidson for example – a couple of years ago they started shifting their marketing focus over to women. If they were to sponsor an event, they would want to gain the attention and buying interest from women as a result of their efforts. So, let’s say you were to report to them the following: We saw a 10% increase in numbers at our event this year, and we even handed out 100% of the discount cards you gave us. Our twitter following has increased by 500 and we tweeted about you nearly 15 times in the last 5 days since the increase (all hypothetical of course). OK. Great, but did sales from women increase? They don’t care about your twitter following if they didn’t see an ROI that indicated sales interest from women were up. It might have been more effective to report something like this: as a result of our joint marketing efforts, we saw a 10% increase in traffic at our event and 7% of those were women. According to our survey, 82% said they respected Harley Davidson for their efforts in sponsoring and would be likely to come in for a test drive in the next 6 months. It looks like while 100% of the discount cards were handed out, about 22% of those actually turned them in at a dealership to redeem the reward and test drive a bike. Our twitter efforts drove another 39 women to the page on our website we set up on HD’s behalf to register for mailings and receive a raffle ticket for the prize Harley is providing at the event… just a few hypotheticals. Do you see the difference?
So how can you make sure you fall into the “right” numbers category instead of reporting things your sponsor can’t really do anything with, nor use to prove the value of their investment? Well, you ask them what they want. Do they want more brand recognition? Do they want to see sales of a particular product spike? Do they want to reach a new target audience? Do they want to see more test drives? You then take this information and create an activation strategy that gives you the ability to measure outcomes more ingeniously – more in line with what your sponsor finds valuable! And when you offer ROI around what your sponsor wants to know, guess what that does to the probability of them signing on for another year? And that’s a number that really matters!!