The on-going debate surrounding the disruptive noise created by the vuvuzela – the plastic horns adopted by locals and spectators during the South Africa 2010 World Cup, made me think of the disruptive “noise” created by data within Marketing departments.

Digital marketing is blessed by a high degree of accountability; unfortunately accountability comes at the price. Somebody once told me managing online data is like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. In addition to the sheer volume of data, marketers are faced with identifying relevant metrics – metrics that help manage the short term and long term performance of a brand and marketing investments.

Since 2003 we have been faced with this challenge – clients, publishers and partners requesting a methodology that extracts the most value from their data. Before we molded our silver bullet, we reviewed several business principles to help guide our approach.

Kaplan & Norton’s (Harvard Business Review, February 1992) use of “the balanced scorecard” principle shaped our approach. What they essentially said through the balanced scorecard approach was that when managing the performance of a company and its assets (in this case data), there were many interests and data points to take in account. To be of any value measures have to be inter-related as opposed to exist in isolation. Our interpretation of “the balanced scorecard” principle led to a simple tailored belief.    

In order to combine a long-term roadmap with short-term actionable insight, data has to be interlocked to develop a “balanced scorecard” of marketing and brand data - compared to history, the industry or a competitive set.

 We call it a Brand Dashboard.

Our Brand Dashboard combines proprietary, third-party and public data to provide a full view of your brand’s health. With our Brand Dashboard you can not only capture more insights from the existing sales funnel, but also introduce new sources of data to enrich your consumers’ profile in the digital space – and ultimately widen the funnel to capture more revenue.

The Brand Dashboard includes a series of brand metrics with weighted influence, grouped into four manageable brand facets:

1. Awareness
2. Engagement
3. Loyalty
4. Efficiency 

These four brand metrics are benchmarked against three individually-weighted dimensions: 1) performance relative to competitive set, 2) directional performance trend across date range, and 3) rolling average of competitive or directional performance.

The ATLAS Institute confirms the value of our brand dashboard. Most brands only measure 6% of the consumer purchase funnel, focusing almost entirely on qualitative metrics. While these qualitative metrics are incredibly valuable, they need to be complemented with engagement metrics.

Alain Portmann, author of  ”Building a balanced scorecard of marketing and brand performance” is Web Liquid’s Founding Partner, Head of Strategy. Visit www.webliquidgroup.com for more thought pieces.

About Alain Portmann

My job is simple. To inspire staff, clients and consumers.

Mail | Web | More Posts (64)

This is some text prior to the author information. You can change this text from the admin section of WP-Gravatar  My job is simple. To inspire staff, clients and consumers. Read more from this author