January 28, 2022

Oh, hello! 

So, how has your week been?

If you are Mark Cuban, things are going pretty well.  

The shark-tanking, basketball team-owning billionaire just launched an online pharmacy that promises to cut out the middleman and help lower the cost of generic drugs. An applaudable endeavor, for sure. 

As a healthcare marketer, I have an interest in watching the project.  

And as a people-focused marketer, I'm more interested in the KPI he’s tracking. 

Yup, according to Mark, there is only one KPI that matters:

How much can we reduce the stress of patients who buy our medication? 

That might be my favorite KPI ever, and here’s why.

🙌 It Hooks Accountability To Mission

Look, it is never my intention to come off like a Marketing Pollyanna. However, I will embrace the challenge of tying our KPIs to our ability to solve our customer’s problems vs. patting ourselves on the back for getting them to click, jump, and convert. 

Your brand exists for a bigger purpose. 

Put your money where your mouth is and fulfill it. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not discounting the importance of your metrics. 

• You have to track your marketing and business actions.
• You have to build intelligent pathways.
• You need to efficiently convert people and understand the resources being spent to do it. 

But we also need to embrace some new metrics. Ones that acknowledge that some of our most critical brand moments will never show up on an analytics report because they are not the result of a one-to-one click or action.

Instead, they happen quietly, in the background, without our knowledge. And they are just as important.

It is easy to get so caught up in tracking the things we can easily track that we start discounting anything else.  

Be better than that.

What are the leading indicators you can start measuring to help you get more thoughtful about whether your efforts are making an impact--not just on your bottom line, but someone else’s?

How can we make “effectively solving the customer’s problem” a leading KPI for the content we create and the service we provide? 

Because, if the question is whether we should be assigning metrics to solving the problems we originally sought out to solve, the answer is abso-freaking-lutely.

I can get a little soapbox-y about that.

 🕵️ It Invites Curiosity & Fact-Finding 

I do a lot of site planning for new websites that come into the agency. Creating logical paths is one of my joyful work tasks--blending my research skills with my love for organization.

I’m not fun at parties, but I can design a beeeeautiful site architecture for you. 

I study the audiences, do the homework, and then hand my recommendations to a UI/UX or growth strategist to review them together.

 And that’s when they mercilessly attack my work. 

• Who are the site audiences?
• How much insight do you really have?
• What is the problem we solve for each audience?
• What are they scared of? What do they want?
• How does this let them do it faster?
• Did you consider doing it this complete opposite way?

My teammates aren’t jerks; they’re on a fact-finding mission. They ask the questions a user would ask to make sense of what they’re looking at. 

That process reminds me a lot of Mark’s singular KPI. And it's what happens when the customer's primary goal becomes your primary goal. You get new permission to be curious on their behalf. To dig deeper and to understand what, why, and how they want what they want. 

If you've ever worked with Overit, you know what's how we approach our projects. And it's just fun.  

🙃 It Opens the Wacky KPI Door 

The thing I'm most appreciative of about Mark's comment? It got me thinking about all the other missing metrics I wish I could get my hands on. Some of these I could work with my growth marketing team to make happen, but others are, well, they're more complicated.

Like what, you ask?

• # of times a website has been screenshot and sent to someone in either amusement or disdain
• # of times our content appears printed and taped to someone’s office wall for easy reference
• # of times our brand name appears next to a string of heart emojis in someone’s text history
• The odds someone would recognize our brand voice in a dark room
• # of times interacting with us has improved someone's mood or helped them feel more in control
• # of times someone emailed our stuff to a colleague with the phrase “hey, you might find this helpful”

What would this tell me? It might establish some new Happiness KPIs.

Not for your happiness. Your customer’s happiness.

It might reveal whether my customers are doing more than just walking the path I've laid out, but if they feel better for having made the trip. 

Happier people buy and use our produces and services more often. That's not clever. It's obvious.

   * * * *

What trackable or untrackable thing do you wish you knew?

It can be kinda fun to plot them out.

Thanks for getting this far. I'll be back in two weeks.

I saw this while scrolling and had a good chuckle. May this be the exact energy you bring into your weekend.

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