Clicks not an accurate gauge of effective marketing

Marketing’s focus has always been on business growth, but how to measure this growth has changed as new tools and the digitalisation of business has reimaged the function.

Digital Nation spoke to Josh Grace, former CMO at Samsung about the transformation of the marketing function throughout his career.

“I've grown up in marketing,” says Grace.

“In fact, my dad used to run Leo Burnett, worked there for 50 years. So I literally grew up running the hallways of the agency and then spent the first 20 odd years of my career, working in different agencies both here in Australia and overseas.”

Grace says that he has seen the biggest transformation occur in the last decade where digital has enabled business transformation.

“Increasingly, you're seeing Australian companies really work out how they can integrate that customer experience into the heart of their operations and drive business growth as a result,” says Grace.

“That's very much I think, where the biggest piece of transformations happened. And that's really where the power of digital is valuable beyond I think, just digital media.”

Grace cautions though, that digital does not solve for everything. And as CMOs look to justify the marketing spend, they need to consider it holistically.

“When you look at digital from a media perspective, there's been I think, a lot of false dawns around the measurability of marketing and its effectiveness because it was always reliant on things called first click or last click attribution. And that is not an accurate gauge of what is working well.”

Over-reliance on digital as caused some marketers to move away from the necessary fundamentals, says Grace.

“I think what often gets lost is to drive growth in a sustained fashion over time, really, it comes down to being more persuasive with your creative communications, and making sure those communications are seen more often by your customer, than your competitor’s communications.”

Grace says that the combination of creative impact and media impact is where the measurement of marketing success is determined. For businesses that put too much focus on finite click metrics, they can miss the fundamental impact of share of voice.

“There's been in recent times, I think, a little bit of a swing of the pendulum back towards looking at a more holistic way of measuring media impact and not just relying on some of the more, I guess, finite measures that digital will give you, which can often be just very bottom of funnel focused.”

Kate Phillips, VP of Global Marketing at Criteria Corp told Digital Nation, that the pandemic has allowed marketing teams and broader business functions to be more experimental with campaigns, with technology and with new ways of working.

She says, “The appetite for experimentation has really, I think, increased not just within marketing teams, but also across businesses in general, who are much more willing to try new things, learn from them, see how they go, fail comfortably, if necessary, and do it all again, and do it better the next time.”

When it comes to customer experience, Grace says that focusing on minimising friction points in order to generate credit, rather than loyalty, is where CMOs are seeing the best return on investment.

“In the CX space, though, I think that's where the CMO has really started to be able to pull through that full funnel impact of what's going on and really start to understand where the opportunities of value are and, and the ROI that they can deliver. And certainly they can make things a lot more efficient and deliver a lot more sales improvements as a result of that, as well as obviously, retain and cross sell and upsell customers as well by doing a good job.”

Credit: The video was produced by Josh Lundberg, Matthew Ryan and Tejas Bhat.