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“The great benefit of digital is that it is measurable”.

This old adage (yes, time moves fast in the digital world!) is the reason online marketers will tell you their discipline is far superior to offline equivalents. And it’s true: online campaigns produce vast amounts of data. Whether we’re talking click-throughs, conversions, downloads, followers… the list goes on and the numbers keep soaring.

This road is fraught with danger however. With these data points we end up quoting obscure, meaningless digits that only serve to quantify, but not qualify, end results. We measure without a purpose, without an end goal.

Beware measurement without an aim

Measurement for measurement’s sake is a waste of everyone’s time. It has to be focused and tied to an overarching goal.

For example, it’s great we can measure Twitter followers, but a thousand followers is a pretty meaningless statistic by itself. What lies behind the figures? Who are these people? What actions have they taken? Have they visited our website? Are they increasing brand awareness? Does the effort justify the business impact?

These are the questions that, no matter how many measurement metrics we are blessed with, are still difficult to answer – offline and online.

Decide goals and then decide what metrics meet these goals

The easy mistake to run into is failing to set and agree campaign objectives from the start. This renders effective measurement impossible and the efforts to achieve the impossible are a waste of time for everyone involved.

Having a Twitter profile, for example, should not itself be the key objective, but part of the strategy to achieving an overarching business goal. To truly measure its effectiveness, it needs to be tied to a particular anticipated outcome: user engagement, customer service, prospect nurturing, direct sales etc.

Measurement is an absolutely fundamental part of marketing. The web arms us with the tools to finally be able to prove (in most cases) that marketing efforts are making a difference to a business. But numbers alone won’t hack it.

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The national press and online media were awash with stories this month that Morgan Stanley had published a report written by a 15 year old intern. The subject: teenage media consumption habits

The theme of the note was that traditional media are of little interest to teenagers and that Twitter is not a social network that they engage with. Neither of these points came as much of a surprise if you follow social media trends. What was revealing, was that an internationally renowned investment bank was turning to a teenager for insights into the youth audience.

The teenager in question may not be truly representative of your average 15 year old but the process of getting your audience to tell you what they think is of enormous value. Rather than commissioning a disinterested party to write the piece (the alternative being a 30 something Oxbridge graduate with an MBA and little true insight into the daily life of a spotty youth), they went directly to the source. This approach is equally applicable for delving into just about any other audience.

Research projects with large sample sizes and sophisticated modelling techniques are an invaluable tool for establishing high level trends, yet can conceal as much of the valuable nuance as they reveal. Having a technique that provides you with the “colour supplement” can often complement and enhance the research process, and deliver a compelling insight or actionable data.

By way of example, there was an interesting insight delivered through the research note.  “Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit).”  The fact that they don’t use Twitter is well established. The reason why is harder to establish.

This opens up a whole range of interesting thoughts and opportunities – both in terms of what other things teens are not doing with their phones because it chews up credits, as well as what their level of price elasticity is across a whole range of potential offers

Interestingly, one of the things that the ‘youth’ value less than the rest of the population is their personal data, which they are prepared to trade in exchange for free services.  What are the implications for database building, and through that, relationships with the mass of consumers of the future?

We would encourage businesses to consider what value can be obtained from getting a client or customer to keep a diary, or write a piece on how they are consuming media and why. You may be surprised by what you find out.

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An interview with Dom Hawkings from The Insight Business

How much do you really know about your target customers?  How old are they?  What are they interested in?  How do they travel to work? Do they even read trade journals?  How do they communicate with friends?  What influences their purchase decisions? What keeps them up at night?

Understanding your audience properly has got to be the starting point for any effective PR and marketing campaign. We are all getting better at filtering out marketing messages and competition for share of voice is fierce, so now is not the time to make assumptions about your audience.

With this is mind, we caught up with Dom Hawkings, Director at The Insight Business to find out how to use focus groups to get inside the minds of buyers of technology products and services from both a corporate and consumer perspective. Wildfire have recently partnered with them on research projects to help our clients adopt a more audience-centric approach to communications.

WF: Can a focus group really change the way a company does business?

DH: Clients truly start to understand their target audiences from first hand experience of watching and listening to them. With this understanding of customers and prospects, the company can start to be driven by what their market actually wants, rather than what they think their market should want. And this can completely change the way a company does business.

In many focus groups we have run, reactions to ideas or concepts have radically changed how clients thought they were going to communicate in terms of ad campaigns, re-branding etc. Some have even led to upcoming product launches being cancelled or completely re-prioritised and some have identified completely new markets.

WF: What are the five top tips you can provide when it comes to understanding audiences?

DH:

Be open minded. This means being brave enough to ask questions that might elicit answers and opinions that you don’t really want to hear. If research doesn’t challenge your preconceptions and sometimes make uncomfortable viewing, it isn’t being done properly.

Use an objective third party to talk to customers and prospects for you. Existing clients rarely tell you what they really think of you as an organisation, especially if you have built up a personal relationship with them – just think how often you complain to your friends about the quality or portion size in a restaurant but when the waiter asks how it is you all pipe up “fine thanks”.

Be a little humble. You may spend every waking hour thinking about your company’s products or services, but for your customers and prospects they rarely occupy quite so much of their consciousness. So if some carefully targeted communication gets little reaction or a product enhancement is not greeted with cheers, take it on the chin.

Do it early enough. Input from your audience about your products, services, marketing campaigns etc. can be invaluable, so don’t leave it to the last minute. There is no point getting this input at a stage where little can be changed – it is normally when this happens when you find out that your audience hates whatever it is you have just committed to doing.

Involve all the stakeholders. Focus groups and other research are not just of interest to marketing types. Get the sales and product teams involved; they will find it fascinating and they are much more likely to act constructively on the outputs.

WF: What’s the most unusual thing you’ve discovered in a focus group?

DH: Some years ago we were running some groups in Italy, looking at mobile phone use. One woman openly explained that she did not like the idea of video calls because it was harder to conceal where you really were. Her concern was that if her husband called he may be able to see when she was at her lover’s house! This raised a polite laugh among the group, but I was surprised when another three women agreed and went on earnestly to talk about why this was a major flaw in the technology!

In the age of digital media, when brand reputations are made and broken so fast, it is always great to see that some brands truly do care and still try to reach out to their customers. Case in point: Overstock.com, an online retailer of brand-name merchandise, recently launched in the UK.

Not too long ago, a Guardian tech journalist has used Twitter to ask for recommendations on the best websites selling luxury goods. Using the same micro-blogging website, I replied to her that Overstock.com was one of my favourite websites for shopping.

A few days later, I receive the following message from the company:

overstockdotcom @GabiWarren Thanks for recommending us! We really appreciate it.

Very simple and not incredibly time consuming. However, such a message is incredibly powerful. So powerful that I felt compelled to blog about it.

This occurrence has a lesson within it, which is: It is becoming very easy for brands to find out exactly who their customers are, and what they are up to, and better yet to communicate directly with them. Brands that choose to ignore social media do so at their own peril, as people are increasingly looking for this direct, easy and informal communication from brands. They want to feel special, and know that they are valued as a customer.

Centaur Media has announced that the Precision Marketing title is to cease publication from the February issue, with most of publisher’s coverage of direct marketing moving into Marketing Week.

This is no surprise. Precision Marketing’s (new) editor Mark Choueke was named the new editor of Marketing Week last month. The title itself was moved from a weekly to a monthly title late last year. So things haven’t been looking good for a while.

Is this a problem?

In my mind, it just demonstrates the importance of online and the uphill battle that print titles now face.

It is a shame that there is not going to be a Centaur title dedicated to direct marketing (although it is still unclear whether the website will survive), though with Mark at the helm, we can but hope the editorial focus at MW might readjust itself. Marketing Week is a good publication, but its focus is still very much big brands, advertising/branding and big agency.

Moving all news online and leaving the magazine to handle comment and features is surely the way to go. The rumours are that the magazine and the website will get a major revamp soon. Watch this space!

Continuing misfortunes suggest its not a great time to own a newspaper.

The New York Times continues to suffer with the slump in advertising really hitting home.

Marketing guru Seth Godin has posted a great blog article looking at the ways in which a newspaper could turn itself around in the current climate.

As Seth mentions (and I have highlighted before) the mindset of a newspaper organisation is defined by the daily news cycle which in itself is defined by “cost of paper, the finite nature of paper, the cost of delivery and the cycle of a daily paper. You run enough articles to fit as many ads as you can sell. These are artifacts of a different age, one that today’s consumer doesn’t care a whit about.”

So Seth puts forward some great suggestions for newspaper organisations, mainly focused around understanding and utilising the assets the brand has at its disposable in the digital environment.

This is all about not standing still. Moving with the times and realising that a business has changed or the society in which the business operates has changed.

There is great, practical advice here for any business or start-up: build and optimise your best asset and build value around that. Then don’t rest on your laurels. Stay ahead of the game and develop new ways to grow new assets or develop existing ones. For anyone marketing or publicising a brand, identifying these assets is vital. And an asset could be a great number of things, from the brand itself to a product, service, specicialism, thought, customer, idea, person, supporter….

It is a theme that Seth also explores in his book, Purple Cow, which I also highly recommend.