May 19, 2023
Happy Friday!
Can I admit something here in our sacred space?
The mere mention of KPIs can make me queasy.
Now, hold on. I understand that measuring our Key Performance Indicators is crucial. Our purpose at Overit has always been to grow our clients' revenue and connect people to brands in a meaningful way. KPIs keep us accountable for that.
I am down with the "measure everything" mantra. ✌️
But sometimes, I hear marketers mistaking what's easy to track for meaningful information. You're telling me what happened (someone clicked, called, or converted) when I want to dissect why it occurred and what it means in the larger context of the business and brand experience.
I don’t want to stop measuring. I want to measure what matters. There are KPIs that we should focus on but don't.
For example, how well do you:
Keep People Involved
Last week, I attended The Brief: Marketing Brew Summit with my colleague Caitlin Nicholson in New York City. It wasn’t until we were on the train, eyes on Manhattan, that I realized this was my first time in the city since the pandemic. Wild.
If you were looking for tactical recommendations or to hear about the latest platforms to try, there was much of that to be found at the event.
Yet, it was the theme of fostering collaboration among teams that kept sticking out for me.
As an industry and even as colleagues, we joke about the silos that exist. The invisible walls and the fight for resources ($$) that occur between:
- Sales and Marketing
- Marketing and HR
- Strategy and Creative
- Creative and Digital
- Digital and PR
- Production and Finance
These barriers hurt all of us and move nothing forward. How do we bridge the existing misalignment?
We Keep People Involved.
- Don’t seek buy-in. Build partnerships.
- Establish cross-department KPIs for everyone to co-own. By building a single brand health index, we encourage all teams to look at, discuss, ideate, and measure the same goals.
- Don’t pitch aspirational theories. Show tangible things. Prototype your ideas so others don't have to guess at what they can’t see.
- “Here’s a mock press release that shows how we’d go to market.”
- “Here’s what the headline would be.”
- “Here’s how we would lay out the sales page.”
- "Here's how we'll co-brand this initiative with that other one."
- “Here is the expected return.”
- Share all the data without filtering it through one person's perspective (bye-bye, silos!) to facilitate understanding among the team. Bringing unfiltered data to a broader group allows for the right insights to be gleaned to build the right strategy for growth. I don’t like when I’m told what the data means. I may have context and a view different from yours. Let's find the story together.
Keeping People Involved is how we change the conversation to show that marketing is a growth driver, not a cost center.
Keep People Interested
Marketing’s job isn’t just to get people to come.
Our job is to get them to come back.
At The Brief, Michael Kaye, Global Director of Brand Marketing at OkCupid! shared how the dating app combines data, insight, and newsjacking to delight users and keep them engaged. From going #TeamAriana to Thunberging, their small marketing team has successfully connected purpose and pop culture to creatively spin data, launch new dating profile questions, and earn buzz from top-tier media.
They're also helping people find love. Aw!
Hannah Kelly, CMO at Resy, shared how the reservation platform uses high-quality editorial content to help people discover and book restaurants. Their model is different from an Open Table. It’s not just about helping you find where you will eat tonight. It’s about tapping into the shared experience of finding the right place, at the right time, for the right occasion, to spend with the right people. Their award-winning stories, guides, and interviews help you do that and give you a reason to return. It's culinary nirvana.
In both examples, it’s not just about wooing someone once. It’s about getting them to return, reengage, and build upon their shared experience.
Make people care, and then make them come back.
Keep People Inspired.
Unfortunately, this last one hits a little differently.
I was the only person left in the office last week when I saw the headline:
Mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, known as Dooce to fans, dead at 47.
I’m not often stopped in my tracks, but that did it.
Are you familiar with Heather?
“Mommy blogger” is a nauseating term, but it sounds exceptionally minimal and misogynist when describing Heather. Heather was the fierce, fearless writer behind Dooce. She was a pioneer who taught a generation of women they could write raw, honest, and hilarious first-person accounts of their lives because they watched her do it first.
To understand that magnitude, you have to understand that today’s version of social media didn’t exist in the early 2000s. We were women writing on blogs trying to form a connection through shared experiences, writing not to get attention but to be seen. Content wasn't shared through a large social following but person-to-person, the way authentic villages best form.
Heather blogged about motherhood and life first.
Then, substance abuse and depression.
When the news broke last week that Heather had died by suicide, the comments of every article started the same way.
Because of Heather, I….
Heather Armstrong taught me how to…..
I didn’t know that I could until Heather…
Heather was said to earn $40,000/month from banner ads at the height of her blog.
Yet, Heather’s leading KPI wasn’t her site traffic or clicks. She would Keep People Inspired. She knew what so many marketers DON’T know is that the performance side doesn’t work if you haven’t earned trust first.
Attention dries up if ad spend is all you feed it.
When we talk about KPIs, we need to think as much about how we involve, interest, and inspire people as the last click, easier-to-track metrics themselves. Because it's those less tangible KPIs that drive the most sustainable, long-term performance, and it's the people who do the buying.
