Marketing Metrics: The Hard and The Soft

There's a huge amount of discussion lately about measuring marketing based on ROI. And there seem to be two camps—Hard and Soft.

The Hard Marketing Camp wants to tie everything to sales metrics saying anything that doesn't result in a revenue measurement doesn't count.

The Soft Marketing Camp is focused on initiatives that drive engagement, conversations, interactions, awareness and brand.

Some of this distinction is tied to getting the respect of the executive team which translates into higher budgets.

However, I can't understand the dichotomy. In my opinion, you need both. In a B2B complex sale, [actually any sale] you can't get to revenue without Soft Camp initiatives. In fact, the more "social" marketing becomes, the higher a degree of Soft will be needed to generate Hard results.

This is why I'm such a big fan of marketing automation technology and the ability to score behavior and demographics, as well as shine a light on how prospects turn into buyers. What marketing ultimately needs are progressive metrics that help them prove Soft initiatives drive Hard results. That's what creates solid ROI.

What matters is being able to show, measure and evaluate how each outcome you track feeds into the sales process and, ultimately, impacts the generation of downstream revenues.

In fact, I'd say that proving exactly how marketing is driving demand and displaying that you have the knowledge to consistently move the needle holds more merit than just pointing to the end result without being able to definitively prove how you got there.

With marketing measurement becoming more sophisticated, imagine the ability for marketers to know the factors that cause buyers in specific segments to become sales ready. With integration into CRM, those metrics can be extended to show what happens on the other side of the funnel, as well.

The more visibility marketers have, the less focus will be spent on quantity and the more on quality. The Soft initiatives are what help determine quality—as long as you can measure them. The Hard revenue metrics are what tells you that the quality equation is correct.

For example, what if marketing could prove that Persona A has a 70% probability of buying after exhibiting these behaviors within their activity history (not necessarily in this order):

• specific white paper downloaded


• 3 personal interactions (comments left on blog and responded to, Twitter exchanges, replies to email sends of thought leadership content, etc.)


• opt in for related subject matter email program and they click through on 60% or greater of the sends.


• viewed on-demand demo for their vertical

By discovering specific patterns of behavior, marketers can tweak scoring to measure for their occurrence.  In fact, they could even drive those actions to occur once the pattern has been discovered. Think about the improvement to pipeline forecast accuracy and what that could mean for your company.

Now, all that said, I believe the Hard and the Soft is all one big Combo Camp. Ultimately, if the Soft Camp can't get to related revenue metrics, there's a problem. In a complex sale environment with a longer selling cycle, you've got to measure all the progressive steps to revenue. There are a lot of places along the way that could impact the end result you're after.

Without establishing buying process measurements that track from lead generation throughout sales activities, you'll have a really hard time figuring out just where those gaps exist. Let alone be able to close them.

Being able to show progressive behavior across the pipeline holds merit. In fact, if you can prove marketing is increasing the number of conversations and interactions during each stage—and that those activities lead to active demand—then your revenue numbers will follow suit.

Comments

[Michael Carpentier]

Excellent! Being an online video property with an ever growing focus to provide the back-end tools to enable lead nurturing we deal with these issues all the time. Our belief of the new role media plays in B-to-B marketing is that of an integrated partnership where not only do we aggregate traffic/audience but then also provide the advertiser with a set of tools to allow them to engage with their customers. These range from video webinar sign ups, custom newsletter campaigns leveraging video, custom content subscription campaigns (i.e. unique learning content), peer-to-peer sharing etc. Measuring and creating metrics around these components is critical. Analyzing key purchase triggers/points is of fundamental importance.

[Douglas Karr]

Engagement, conversations, interactions, awareness and brand can be tied back to numeric, measurable goals as well. It's simply the lifespan of measurement that changes, not the actual metrics.

Great post! Thanks for sharing this!

[Bill Freedman]

These dichotomies are enough to make you want to pull your hair out!

Clearly executives do best with a finite number quantitative metrics which are reported like clockwork...and its easy to establish baselines for social actions such as # of forum posts in the corporate forum or mentions of your brand on Twitter per week. Its even possible to bundles all of these up into a higher level "social visibility metric."

But everything you do doesn't need immediate executive visibility. I frequently pursue soft tactics that I believe will work. When it does, you can provide the case study to others. When it doesn't silence rules. ;-)

BILL

Read "Bill Freedman's Soon To Be A Major Trend," the provocative blog on marketing and persuasion. http://www.showcasemarketing.com/ideablog

[Ardath Albee]

Thanks to Michael, Douglas and Bill for commenting.

I really like the phrase "lifespan of measurement" in context to change. Everything is morphing into "real time" so the lifespan may be really shortening. What do you think?

Another is "everything you do doesn't need immediate executive visibility" - I think this may be key for the experimental nature of new online initiatives. Having the freedom to try, refine and try again is critical when working to keep abreast of evolving tactical execution opportunities.

Of course it doesn't hurt if you can show momentum with each improvement to the effort :-)

And finally, I think the ability to analyze trigger points can provide great insights, but we can't forget to monitor what causes them. Building consistency is hard if you only have one angle of visibility.

[Business Card Printer]

This is great, you have a good grasp of the topic.

[Emily Mayfield]

Great post. With the growing adoption of blogging and social media initiatives among b-to-b companies, it is clear saavy executives are recognizing the importance of soft marketing.

As a Demand Generation Company, we provide marketers with the ability to track both hard and soft marketing efforts and provide metrics for both. In this environment, proving that all marketing initiatives contribute to driving revenue is key!

[Ardath Albee]

Thanks to Business Card Printer for the Kudos - much appreciated!

Hi Emily,

Thanks for chiming in. And for those of you who haven't checked out Manticore Technology's demand gen platform, you should. They've been helping their clients (like Intellitactics) get some great results!

Find out more about that here:
http://www.demandgenreport.com/archive.php?codearti=1210

Ardath