I just read a guest post from Scott Bishop on the Spin Sucks blog entitled “Is your brand navigating the social stream blindly?” Within the blog, Scott comments about “flying blindly” -

“Brands that navigate blindly think social media is more or less a guessing game, a craps shoot. I assure you, there is little room for guessing. Guessing costs time. Guessing costs resources. And it rarely works.”

The longer we consult and work with our clients around social engagement we realize how many companies are “flying blindly.” Those companies that are looking at metrics are focusing on popular indicators such as “unique visitors” and “page views” for your website and “Likes” and “Followers” for social media platforms like Facebook & Twitter. These are good indicators of traffic, but I would challenge these measurements effectively tie into key business goals.

It is my feeling that there is currently a ”mash-up” of departments involved in what we are labeling marketing and communications efforts such as social engagement. For example, these communications efforts typically reside and are being managed by marketing or communications teams internally. While the web analytics and measurements are being managed by the web development or IT teams and once leads have been generated on the website, those contacts are then being handed off to the customer-facing teams such as sales and customer service.

I would claim that we (marketing and communications professionals) have an absolute obligation to become more analytical with our support and efforts. The days of laying claim to “branding & awareness” are behind us (NOTE: I still believe these things are important, just are impossible to measure). I say “obligation” because we now have the technology and tools to tie into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are important to the business goals and objectives of our clients and their management team.

Please take a minute to do a quick analysis of your marketing and communications efforts by asking yourself these 3 questions:

1. Have you clearly identified and incorporated your business goals into your communications plan?

2. Do you have the right measurement tools in place to ensure that your communications efforts are impacting these business goals?

3. Are you listening to these measurements and conversations and adapting your communications efforts accordingly?

I would go as far to say that implementing a communications plan today without focusing on measurements, analytics and metrics that truly impact your business is a potential detriment financially to your company.

What are you doing to be more focused on “Analytical Marketing”? Do you believe marketing and communications efforts should be so directly tied to business goals? As always, I’d love your thoughts on this subject. 

Before I construct this conversation, I will unequivocally take the position that, “yes, I believe your company’s communications efforts must tie into sales.” I’m tired of all those in communications (marketing, PR, advertising, social media, etc.) toeing the line on this issue.

I hate to be so literal and direct, but let’s look at the overall Webster’s definition of “marketing” (NOTE: I realize not all of you view communications within marketing…but I do) -

1a : the act or process of selling or purchasing in a market
b : the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service
2: an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer

Do I believe this is an accurate definition of marketing today? No. Do I believe the principles of marketing are to generate sales? Yes.

Personally, I’m tired of “awareness” and “branding” as default measurements of our communications efforts. While both are significant effects of a solid communications effort, I would question one’s ability to measure either.

The evolution of “Social Engagement” and technology enhancements have allowed us to closely measure the impact of these conversations. While interactions, sentiment, engagement and insights are all valuable ways for us to better understand our audiences and how to help them, they don’t always result in direct sales. What does generate sales are “call to actions” with these audiences that result in clicks, conversions (sharing information with you) and the leads or direct sales that are generated from these efforts.

We shouldn’t limit our ability as communicators to tie into the sales process through our online and social engagement only. Shouldn’t we (marketing/communications) be aligning ourselves with the subject matter experts (SMEs), sales and other customer-facing teams internally to ensure that the most valuable communications and content are being created and shared throughout our company?

I was fortunate enough to have discovered a technology called SAVO. While SAVO prides itself on being a “sales enablement” tool, I’d like to view the on-demand software platform they’ve created as “Marketing’s Holy Grail.” I encourage you to explore their site and blog to learn more about how their technology works, but realize that their platform incorporates all important aspects of fostering such a marketing & sales relationship internally with it’s social networking design (share, comment, rank) and measurement capabilities (ties directly into most CRM systems).

Ultimately, SAVO provides marketing & communications teams the ability to directly tie and measure the sales effectiveness of all forms of communications. Keep in mind, “garbage in, garbage out” so each piece of communications and content must address the specific needs of your sales teams and other customer-facing teams internally.

This certainly gives us all something to think about and consider!

How do you measure the effectiveness of your communications efforts? Are you directly impacting sales?