Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

KPIs Not APIs

Among the issues we cover in the Digital Strategy Sessions I run are the changing roles and responsibilities required to meet the new demands of digital and networked media. These can be some of the thorniest challenges involving the nitty-gritty of who is going to be responsible for what, and crucially, what level of investment will be required for new functions. We look at how to approach this tricky area using planning frameworks that focus on bringing digital marketing in line with traditional business planning. This means moving beyond the view of digital marketing as a box-ticking exercise - or specialist technical silo - and understanding how different techniques genuinely contribute to the business and its bottom-line. It’s an exercise that often raises as many questions as answers but is helpful in moving executives teams away from shiny technology and the latest gizmos. The shorthand I use for this, ‘KPIs Not APIs’. While APIs, or application programming interfaces to give them their proper title, are a core aspect of the modern web’s plumbing, unless they have context within a company’s business plan they are fairly meaningless. Only when that context is shared and understood in an organisation through a planning framework - that can be returned to and improved - can roles and responsibilities be clarified.

Understanding Programmatic

The jargon and opaque terminology around programmatic advertising, such as DMPs and PIIs, obscures – as is often the case in digital marketing – what is actually happening. The moment the link between audience and content was broken and brands started to target people rather than pages, a market emerged for information about individuals and what they are interested in. Think attention data or personal signals. This market has been expanding very rapidly ever since and now can be thought of as being similar to global financial markets, although less vast and sophisticated. That said, there is a lot of advanced trading occuring in these markets among some very big, very well-capitalised players ranging from Dunnhumby to Oracle to Experian. The layering of so-called first, second and third party anonymised data into elaborate targeting packages means companies can profit from media and advertising budgets without ever going near a channel plan. Of course, there’s nothing new in the idea of companies participating in media by supplying market research and targeting information such as email lists and direct marketing databases. However, comparing such old-school techniques to today’s programmatic markets for attention data is like comparing the modern world of global financial instruments to the city of London when all that was required was a bowler hat and a cut glass accent.  In the Digital Strategy Sessions I run we look at what these new programmatic markets mean for brands and what's required to participate.

Would Your Digital Strategy Pass The Chairman’s Test?

One of the common scenarios I come across in the Digital Strategy Sessions I run is when a company has invested in a range of disparate digital products and programmes but are left feeling unsure about what is really being added to the bottom line.  In the majority of cases the problem is that the digital marketing programme is not delivering against business outcomes that senior executives genuinely care about.  This is partly because, in recent years, digital marketing has grown up and slowly joined the mainstream but has not yet been integrated with existing business planning procedures.  For example, senior executives don’t care about clicks, fans and followers. They might like the idea of having the latest digital wizadry but what they really care about are revenues, business development, growth markets, cost efficiencies and recruitment. If the digital marketing programme can’t be demonstrated to deliver against these issues – even in a minor way – it can never expect to receive the full support of those signing off on major investments. The question I pose in the Digital Strategy Sessions is would you be happy to stand up in front of your chairman or your clients’ board and present your digital marketing plan?  And, more importantly, are you happy you are addressing the issues that are top of their to-do-lists?

Getting The Data Habit

In the Digital Strategy Sessions I run I often talk about acquiring the data habit. The world of web analytics and data can be utterly overwhelming for those who are coming to it for the first time. It’s the part of the digital marketing ecosystem where jargon and strange language goes on steroids and the whole thing can easily sound like a geeky maths class. Even when looking at simple tools, such as Google Trends, it can be easy to get lost in the vast data sets that it uses. How can so much information be so meaningless is the sense that I think a lot of people – understandably – have. That’s why it’s important to find a single business-related issue and focus on that. And then, crucially, keep on returning to that data on a regular – maybe weekly – basis. The next step is to find a way to log the changes that you see and the picture will begin to appear. You could do this with a few screen shots – or maybe download a CSV file and create a chart in Excel. It doesn't have to be too clever to begin with. Perhaps just try following a company’s brand name on Google Trends and see how it changes over time. Before you know it, you will have developed the data habit.