How do you measure your marketing efforts?

One of the common challenges that many companies face, repeatedly, is how to measure the abilities or efforts of their marketing team, department agency, or partner.  This question can come up when you’re hiring new staff, hiring a new agency, or just trying to improve your current marketing initiatives.

Why is it so hard?

Part of the challenge with measuring marketing is that there are so many different channels that you can currently be marketing in including paid media, organic search, paid social, organic social, PR, influencer marketing, and the list goes on.  At Power Digital we specialize in 13 different marketing channels, each with different ways of measuring success.  Not only that, success can be measured the same way for many channels making attribution difficult.  And further yet, a lot of measuring capabilities and efforts can be very subjective making it difficult to compare one team to another, or the same team over time.

So what is the solution?

At Power Digital, our answer is a detailed, consistent, and data-driven approach.  This approach has resulted in developing an in-depth grading rubric for each channel and individual services within those channels based on years of experience with hundreds of clients and over 150 marketing channel experts on staff.  And today the approach has evolved into our Analyst Survey, one of the core pieces of technology powering the Opportunity Appraisal module of our proprietary nova software.

To accomplish the same thing, you can develop your own grading system by breaking down the channels you want to measure, the services practiced in those channels, and the specific measurements or tasks you want to track in those services.

Marketing Channel ➡ Service / Activity ➡ Measurement 

After identifying your measurement, set your scale and define your grading criteria.  Having this concrete criteria is an important step to moving from difficult to quality effort into a quantifiable number.  Because it is both specific and quantifiable you now have unlocked the magic ability to compare marketing efforts between individuals, teams, and across time.  This can help you make a decision between teams and just as importantly measure progress over time. 

Still a little confusing?  Here is a specific example from our nova software.  

Search Engine Optimization ➡ Off-page SEO ➡ Domain & Page Authority 

Using the same channel, activity, measurement pattern we break down Search Engine Optimization into Off-page activity, and two different ways of measuring off-page activity.  And in this example we break out the grading criteria for Domain & Page Authority on a scale of 1-5.  Looking at the criteria you can see how you can start to specifically measure what might otherwise be a subject observation.  And different people, at different times, looking at different teams can measure that activity and marketing and come up with the same number.

What do I do first?

If you want, go ahead and start building your own measurement and grading system.  Tools like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets can be very powerful for building these.  Pick your most important channels, identify your activities in that channel, and data points for those activities with specific grading criteria.  Collect data from your teams, and track that data over time.  You will learn a lot about your team and have an objective starting point when considering new marketing teams and team members.

At Power Digital, nova and our Analyst Survey can currently measure 13 different marketing channels, broken out to 70+ marketing activities, and hundreds of specific data points to objectively measure the effectiveness and effort within those channels.  And although they’re part of our proprietary software, we are happy and eager to share it with you.

If you want to talk to someone on our team, we will run a complimentary nova Opportunity Appraisal for your company and team including an Analyst Survey & Scorecard breaking down the efforts and effectiveness of the marketing channels you prioritize the most.