Break Your Data Addiction by Measuring Return On Objectives

We live and market in the era of big data when you can more or less, instantly assess the performance of an email blast, a social media campaign, or a landing page.

Unfortunately, stone-cold numbers aren't quite enough to help integrated marketers understand how much of an impression you made at an event, if your new packaging is really resonating with customers, or if your content marketing efforts are helping to strengthen your brand.

ROO is a Better Measure of Impact

Enter ROO, or Return On Objectives. In short, it's a way to measure a project's impact that isn't directly tied to a cut-and-dried number like sales or page views. It's also a way to get a true sense of the success of multi-component projects and campaigns that don't have a single, immediately measurable result, such as:

• Trade shows and events
• Branding refreshes
• Signage and packaging

But, because ROO provides a broad representation of difficult-to-measure attributes like awareness, intention, or positive perception, you may need to include quantitative data as evidence, as explained below.

What You Can Measure (and How to Measure It)

Since ROO is tied to your objectives, this means you're going to need to be clear about them up front and bake them into your creative brief. Some of what you're measuring may be intangible (e.g., based on attitudes or opinions), but you'll need to be specific about what moving the needle looks like. For example:

The project: packaging refresh

Potential objective: convey a story and brand with deeper resonance to your target

How you're going to measure it: surveying social media engagement, online comments, and earned media

The project: a tradeshow/event presence

Potential objective: increase overall awareness within a specific audience segment

How you're going to measure it: counting requests for information and inbound calls, analyzing booth traffic and post-event web traffic

Looking at ROO is perfect for marketing activities that usually don't produce immediate sales, but are essential to achieving long-term goals that go far beyond making the cash register ring once.

Intrigued? Come back next month! We'll dig deeper into ROO and explain how integrated marketers can measure it in tandem with old-fashioned ROI - the results can help you improve your process and make a big impact on your bottom line.