What Is Accountable Marketing?

There are two opinions when it comes to marketing. Some think of it as an art; others think of it as a science.

Put it this way- those who believe marketing is an art are quite often the same people who invest considerable sums on sporadic marketing efforts in the hope that eventually they'll get some return on investment.

That is not accountable marketing. That is reckless marketing.

Accountable marketing expects to see a purpose, result, and return on every element of your marketing. It aligns marketing with a cost and makes marketing efforts accountable for leads and sales — in the same way, a salesperson is held responsible for hitting targets.

Without measuring their return, you wouldn’t invest thousands of pounds in a sales team each year. Why would you do the same for marketing?

And just like successful sales and business development teams, data is key to accountable marketing. Having the big, data-based picture, is fundamental when it comes to making decisions on how to spend your time, which channels to invest in, when you should invest in marketing, which initiatives work best for your business, and so on...

What doesn’t get measured doesn’t matter

If you can’t measure something, don’t invest in it.

It is quite easy to spend money on campaigns because ‘that’s what you’ve always done’ or because you’ve heard it has worked for other businesses. Even worse, you were blinded by facts and figures from a pushy salesperson trying to sell you space in a magazine or irrelevant directory.

If you can’t measure what your marketing is going to bring to your business, how will you ever know if it is worth the money?

For example, investing more in social media marketing is pointless unless you know things like:

• How much traffic have previous campaigns directed to your site?
• What conversion rate does that traffic have?
• The quality of resulting inquiries.
• Whether you've previously had customers with a social media lead source.

Understanding these metrics will allow you to make decisions on whether to invest further in social media. It also makes social media accountable for any sales that have come through that channel.

So, what should you be measuring?

You certainly shouldn’t be trying to measure everything, it’s important to know the difference between vanity metrics and growth metrics.

Vanity metrics such as page views, Facebook likes, and post shares can be easily played off as a success. They are easy-to-track numbers and mean people are enjoying your content. Right?

Suppose a post you published on Facebook gets 100,000 views and 500 shares — that’s pretty impressive! But was it a success if that same post or campaign got you zero leads? Of course, it means your content has had some exposure and has likely boosted your brand awareness, but do views and shares really contribute to your bottom line?

Nope.

Instead, focus on the metrics that matter. Things such as website conversions, qualified prospects, content offer downloads, and sales. Things that make a difference to your bottom line and business growth. Things that marketing can be accountable for.

Align Your Marketing Goals With Your Business Goals

Choosing the metrics to measure your marketing against should align with your marketing goals. And those should be very much aligned with your overall business goals.

Having concrete targets will make measuring your marketing much easier, and ensuring your efforts are aligned with business goals will give your marketing the accountability it needs.

For example, if one of your business goals is to achieve three new business sales per month and you know your sales team operates on a 50% conversion rate, your marketing should aim to provide at least six new qualified leads.

You can even take this a step further if you know your website visit-to-enquiry rate. For example, if your website typically converts 5% of the time, you know you’ll need to direct at least 120 unique users to your site each month.

That means you’ll want to measure metrics such as:

• Qualified leads
• Unique users
• Website enquiries
• Marketing lead conversion rate.

Each of these metrics aligns with your marketing and business goals so you now know what you should and shouldn’t be tracking.

Now that is accountable marketing!

How Can I Track My Marketing?

The running theme here is that you should be able to track every marketing effort. From blog posts, social media efforts, emails, calls to action, and even web pages, you should know how each part of your campaign contributes to traffic, leads, and sales.