Stephanie Chavez, CTSM is the President at Zen Media and a Cynopsis Top Women in Media honoree for 2019.
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Are there any other high achievers out there who are triggered by this title? I’m going to bet the answer is yes. After all, you don’t get to the executive level without having a strong drive to push past “good enough” and live in “great.” But on the other side of that, you can’t become a great leader without a realistic sense of balance. Sometimes good enough is exactly that: good enough. For CMOs, the trick is knowing which outputs need to be great no matter what, and which you can afford to settle on (sometimes).
Here are a few guidelines I’ve been using in my own thinking.
Marketing Outputs That Need To Be Great
Let’s start with the fun stuff:
• Branding
When it comes to anything having to do with branding, I’d venture that your outputs need to be consistently high-performing.
The reason for this is that branding is how you stay in your client’s or customer’s mind for the long haul. It’s how you create long-term customer loyalty. And for B2Bs, it’s how you keep your brand in a client’s mind during their long, circuitous buyer journey.
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You need the junior accountant to remember you in three years when they’ve been promoted to senior manager and are heading up their company’s buying group. You need that customer who saw your branded content six months ago to recognize your logo and colors when they come across a blog article you just posted.
Now that so much of the buying journey is happening unseen by buyers who require an average of 27 touchpoints before becoming a customer, you can’t solely rely on a great ad campaign or a major promotion to bring in customers. You need to invest in the long-term, slow-growing but sustainable strategy of branding to make sure you stay top of mind.
• Amplification
This is another area where you can’t settle for good enough. Amplification refers to getting the most out of every press hit and piece of content you can. So, if you’re running a PR campaign and you get three press hits out of it, you want to amplify each one of those by:
• Sharing the link on social and tagging the outlet.
• Quoting the coverage/content in an Instagram story or other social post.
• Repurposing the coverage/content into a video, blog post, etc., that dives deeper into the topics mentioned.
• Adding it to your website and social profiles, as appropriate.
• Running a paid ad campaign that features the press hit to build both credibility and awareness.
Given the number of powerful digital tools we have at our disposal, lagging in the amplification arena simply isn’t acceptable. If your team needs help understanding the importance of amplifying or doesn’t have a good handle on how to do it, you need to work with them as soon as you can. The time will be well worth it.
Marketing Outputs That Can Be ‘Good Enough’
Now for the other side of things. I want to start by saying that ideally, you will only have to settle for “good enough” every once in a while. If any of your outputs are always at this “good enough” level, there’s probably some rethinking and reworking that needs to happen. Given that, these are the outputs that I’ve put in this “good but not great” category:
• Click-Through Rates
One KPI that I’ve been rethinking is the click-through rate (CTR). LinkedIn has some great research on this that we’ve written about at Zen as well, which says high CTRs can actually be a negative indicator.
If you spend your time chasing high CTRs, you’ll simply find that you’ve wasted a lot of your team’s time and energy on something that has not been proven to correlate to high conversion rates—not the ones that count at least, like sales or positive brand sentiment.
• Advertising Value Equivalency
Advertising value equivalency (AVE) is still a useful metric for PR campaigns—especially for clients who have trouble understanding the qualitative value of a PR mention. But I would argue that too much attention is still paid to AVE and not enough is paid to the more holistic KPIs that actually indicate progress: share of voice and brand reach.
Share of voice takes into account several different factors—from a brand’s share of advertising in the industry to the number of social media mentions and more—to present a more holistic picture of where the brand is now, so you can chart where you want it to be.
Brand reach is simply the total number of people who see your content, and it’s useful because people don’t actually need to engage in order for your content or ads to be effective. It’s positive if they do engage, but think about the number of ads and pieces of content you see online. I’m willing to bet you’ve seen an ad for a brand that you remembered later, even if you didn’t click on it. Maybe you even bought something from them or filled out a form on their website.
All this is to say that it’s time for marketers to shift the focus from AVE, which can easily be just “good enough,” and put that leftover effort toward making brand reach and share of voice absolutely amazing.
It’s Always A Balancing Act
As CMOs, we have plenty of campaigns and strategies to juggle. Prioritizing is key, and part of that is knowing when to be happy with what you’ve achieved—even if it’s not a rocket-emoji-worthy result.
The great thing about this? You can always change your priorities. If CTR is vitally important to one of your campaigns, then go all in on it. If your fellow executives need to see certain numbers go up for a period of time, focus on that. As long as you’re engaged in the long-term work of advocating for branding and amplification, flexibility in other areas can only help you in meeting your team’s and your brand’s goals.
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Author: Stephanie Chavez, Forbes Councils Member
