One of the most extraordinary milestones of my time in charge of advertising approvals for the NSW Government was to see two of our campaigns, Pretty Shady and Get Your Hand Off It each achieve more than a million views on You Tube. That’s 10 times the ground capacity of the MCG, aka a heck of a lot of people reacting to an advertising campaign.

As a marketeer, I’ve never really been sure over the last thirty years or so exactly how many people were interacting with my advertising campaigns. It wasn’t so long ago that we tested campaign success by measuring “pre” and “post” awareness.

While we all felt a warm fuzzy feeling on hearing that unprompted awareness of of our products had risen from low% to blah blah%, there was always that nagging reality that awareness testing gave no real insight into whether people bought the product or changed their behaviour as a result.

I’m often presented with the view nowadays that the prime benefit of the digital age is access to greater audience reach than ever before. There are undeniably many people out there using Facebook and carrying mobile phones. But just like old fashioned readership surveys were based on the questions “which of these newspapers have you read or looked at”, finding large audience numbers doesn’t in itself guarantee successful marketing. No publisher ever got rich from the punters who only read their magazine in the hairdressers.

And despite the undeniably enormous audiences now available, a targeted campaign that reaches 200 of your most affluent and ready to purchase customers is still likely to yield greater revenue than randomly shouting your message to 20,000 people on Facebook. Even in the imprecise world of marketing, some principles never change.

For me, the thing the digital age actually offers marketers is the opportunity to be more precise in their thinking. To set benchmarks for performance, to adjust and tweak those measures according to robust analysis of what’s working based on live data and dashboards. To tailor content and approaches that are working and to dump the stuff that isn’t. In real time.

And setting measurable benchmarks shouldn’t be difficult. If you are using a media planner, they can help you set measures that have the dual benefit of checking whether their media recommendations are working. And of course a wealth of social media listening tools can help you monitor the response to each of the elements of your activity.

If your budget is limited, you can measure response elegantly by making your own websites the place people come to for more information. A simple review of Google Analytics will tell you more than  any quantitative awareness tracker. And it’s free.

The key to any successful digital strategy isn’t a piece of technology or software or anything to do with digitality*. It’s having a precise view about what you are trying to achieve before you start. In terms of real strategy, it’s the reason you are doing the campaign in the first place.

And if you can’t nail the precise outcome that you’d like to achieve, before you start, I guarantee that it will be impossible to measure. And if I were the CFO, approving the budget, there’s always a chance I’d be thinking “why bother?”…

 

*made up word. it might catch on…