Could Outcome Marketing be the Next Metric that Your Business Should Pay Attention to?

Have you ever heard of outcome marketing?

PPC, page views, followers/likes, shares, length on video.

You will know the importance that has been placed on these metrics. They validate the success of a campaign, in the fast-paced, analytics-driven, digital age of marketing. However, there is a new way of thinking about what matters when it comes to measuring effectiveness. It is gaining momentum primarily because it consistently produces better results based on a different success metric – outcome marketing.

Traditional campaign based marketing asks that you build your campaigns based on incremental growth as the campaign is deployed. You are checking it to see if it has met criteria based on likes, shares etc. to find a qualified customer with the potential to buy. You hope that by putting in place the call to action at each level (“download this!”, “click here to find out more”), the campaign will yield a bevvy of potential buyers.

But what if you looked at it from a different lens – one that looks to what a customer who has bought your product and is enjoying it comes from – using this experience to build backwards from the profitable behaviour in order to recreate that experience that got them there?

So what does that look like? You will need to understand how quickly your marketing output moves them to action. Does a Facebook “like” convert immediately to a sale? Chances are not. Anyone can like your page without ever having invested interest. But what about email subscribers? Email marketing can get you a little closer to a sale based on the personalisation of the content (if done correctly). And what about a marketing campaign that drew thousands of people to your well-crafted landing page, resulting in X number of sales?

What do our Outcome Marketing outputs show?

Through these outputs, you can observe a direct link between the marketing campaign you ran, and the number of sales that resulted from it. The key is to look for the metric that gets you as close to “point A to point B” as you can possibly get (point A = the marketing activity, point B = the sale or another desired outcome).

To avoid getting lost in the depths of jumbled data analysis, determine your revenue goals before even glancing at any numbers. What are the things you hope to accomplish with your business as a whole? What do you hope to accomplish through x, y, and z marketing outputs? If these questions are clearly answered, it becomes much easier to decipher whether your strategy is working. You can see the true value of your website, for example, when you know what your website’s job is.

Once you are clear on your revenue goals, the distance between your budget and your marketing strategy eases up. For smaller companies or entrepreneurs just starting out, this can also mean less anxiety and less wasted money.

Ultimately, how can you be sure you are on the right track with your marketing strategy? A few things will be true:

You’ll be budgeting based on the impact of a certain marketing activity instead of blindly guessing/chasing surface-level success.
You’ll have individuals designated to each important project; they’ll understand what they are doing and why.
You’ll recap at the end projects to determine what went wrong, what should be repeated, etc.

If you feel like your marketing is both overwhelming and underperforming, focusing on outcome marketing can make a big difference to results.
Let us know if you’d like to chat further.