Video Transcript

At Element Three, we do marketing through the lens of story, strategy and scorecard, and in that order. So we use the scorecard measurement tool to determine whether the story we are telling the marketplace and the strategy we are using to tell that story are impactful or not. When they’re not, we use a scorecard to understand what piece needs to change: story or is there an incorrect piece inside of the strategy?

Preferably the scorecard would actually allow us to do both simultaneously. And that has to be worked toward over time. Now, inside of organizations, one of the biggest mistakes we see that marketing is classically trying to tie revenue directly back to the activity that is being taken inside of the department.

It’s understandable. Everybody wants to say the investment that you made over here produced this level of return. The challenge is that for many marketing organizations,
there is not a clear attribution model between the data that is being gathered
and the revenue that the business drives. So in our perspective, the way to solve that problem is to really begin from the top level and work your way down.

So at the business level, what is needed on the business’s scorecard to know if it is being driven in the direction of the company’s goals? From there, Marketing leadership can be told this is what marketing needs to own and impact for the organization to go where it needs to. And then as a leader inside of the marketing department, you can say to your team, Hey, we need to drive towards these goals.

What individual initiatives should be on individual level scorecards to make sure that you are moving in that direction? Using this top level down perspective allows you to build scorecards that gather the right data, not just data for the sake of gathering data. So to bring this into a real example, going back to that attribution modeling, let’s say you work inside of a long consultative selling process, but you’re gathering information on things like conversion rate optimization on your website, clickthrough rates, really pieces that are highly impactful inside of maybe an e-commerce environment or a fairly transactional business model.

But for you and your team, you understand that developing thought leadership in the marketplace and high levels of brand awareness are really important for your organization’s goals. This data about clickthrough rates and conversion rate optimization might still be great data to have in the future, but it does not align with your revenue objectives right now and moving you closer to those goals.

It can be captured, it can be tracked, but it should not necessarily show up on your scorecard. That might be better served with pieces of thought leadership content produced inside of a week. How many videos did I share on LinkedIn? What’s my engagement level of those videos?

Those are going to be more impactful data sets to show on a scorecard so that you can see a correlation between volume or quality with engagement for your brand. So as you build out your scorecard, really think about what are the steps I need to take to understand how can marketing impact the business overall and what metrics actually line up with those objectives?