Companies need a performance measurement tool that can ingest and analyze both short- and long-term metrics and provide a comprehensive understanding of how these metrics can help achieve marketing success. It can help them track their brand’s health, evaluate how much it contributes to their bottom line, and justify future campaigns that will strengthen their brand.
Brand image is not only crucial but instrumental to the success of a business. But unfortunately, most businesses and marketers are focused on generating sales instead of improving their brand’s lifetime value.
Short-term sales may seem appealing; in fact, they are excellent at ensuring that the revenue keeps climbing, and it’s easy to show how a new ad spot produced additional sales volume. However, there is a dark side to this short-term growth. It depends on promotional campaigns that use discounts and deals to power a sale, but these short-term promotions can cause significant damage over time to the brand equity.
Despite these shortcomings, businesses still choose short-term sales instead of long-term growth. This is because long-term growth is challenging to measure without a good marketing performance tool. But, the opportunity that long-term growth offers is worth the challenge.
There are several marketing performance tools available in the market. Unfortunately, most of these performance tools usually cater to what the majority of the marketers want, and since the focus is on short-term sales, these tools focus on sales and not long-term measurement.
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So, let’s look at a few factors that businesses need to consider before selecting a marketing performance tool.
Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Growth
Both long-term and short-term growth is essential for an organization. The marketing performance tool should be able to analyze how both types of campaigns will grow the business; otherwise, organizations will miss out on half the story.
For instance, in the case of a television advertisement, a performance tool should be able to give marketers data about the short-term success of their campaign, like incremental impact on revenue, and should also be able to measure how much the advertisement impacted brand equity. Layering this with predictive capabilities can help businesses determine how this brand equity will convert into revenue in the future. Thus, maintaining the right balance will maximize both short-term and long-term growth.
Measuring Data from Multiple Sources
Today, consumers are active on multiple channels. This provides brands with a lot of ways to reach potential customers, but at the same time, it makes marketing attribution very difficult.
Most of these data sources have their own measurement tools, and they tend to focus on short-term metrics. This means brands need a tool that can ingest data from these multiple sources to observe long-term trends and deliver better marketing outcomes.
Tracking outside Trends
Marketing campaigns do not exist in a vacuum; therefore, the marketing performance tool should account for that. There are several external factors that impact both short-term and long-term marketing performance, like social, political, and economic environment. An effective marketing performance tool will recognize when disruption occurs and deliver an assessment of how these disruptions may impact a brand’s current long-term campaigns.
The Entire Customer Journey
In order to measure long-term growth, businesses need a tool that can measure not just profitability but the customer journey. This is because the focus of long-term growth is more on attracting and retaining potential customers and increasing brand loyalty.
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A good performance tool should possess predictive capabilities; it should be able to analyze customer purchase patterns and then predict how these patterns will play out. It should then be able to demonstrate how an upcoming brand campaign might affect those patterns.
