New Year's Tips: Marketing and Communications from "Experience" to "Science"

In the digital marketing era, marketing and communication are highly integrated. Communication is generated in marketing, and marketing is realized in the communication process. How to scientifically measure the value of marketing and communication departments? Let's take a look at this article.

After three years of the pandemic, it’s the first time that I can go home and spend the Spring Festival with peace of mind. How is everyone spending the Spring Festival? Are you all back to work?

Let’s get back to the topic. I mentioned in my previous article that in the era of digital marketing, marketing and communication are highly integrated. Communication is generated in marketing, and marketing is realized in the process of communication.

This view is particularly important for understanding marketing and communication. Currently in colleges and universities, marketing and communication actually belong to two different disciplines. The former is in the field of management, while the latter is in the field of journalism and communication.

In corporate practice, we will find that the boundaries between the two are becoming increasingly blurred, and are showing a highly integrated state. The corporate communication department shoulders the responsibility of being the corporate spokesperson, conveying important and authoritative information to a series of stakeholders such as the public, government, shareholders, and customers. This information is likely to change the public's perception and influence the decision-making of stakeholders.

The marketing department of an enterprise is responsible for the process of creating value for the enterprise's products and services by mobilizing internal resources. Where does the value of an enterprise's products and services come from? Naturally, it comes from the sales revenue and profits generated by sales activities, and from winning the recognition and trust of customers. In many enterprises, the marketing communication department belongs to the same department, namely marketing communication.

In my actual work, I am often asked a question in some summits and exchanges with my peers. I believe that this is also a question that many marketing and communication personnel often face: How to measure the value of the marketing and communication department? It seems that marketing and communication personnel must "prove their value to sales personnel" before they are really valuable.

My answer is: If the sales department asks you this question, then there is no need for you to answer it. You don't have to go through the trouble of explaining to them how many sales leads came from what channels, whether there are relevant data, the role of the official website and SEO, and what you did to help them gain potential customers. People who ask this kind of question must be those who don't understand what marketing is and are laymen. If you have a meeting with a layman, will he understand after just a few words?

But that doesn't prevent it from being a good question. You will definitely think it is meaningless to ask the sales department, but it is a good question?

Yes, because usually this kind of question carries challenges and doubts, plus he does not have the basic knowledge of marketing communication beforehand, so you don't expect to convince him. However, a salesperson who asks you this question with an exploratory and learning attitude must have basic knowledge of marketing, and people who have both sales experience and marketing knowledge are likely to be senior executives in the future. You should have a deep conversation with him, and even ask him for sales knowledge and impart sales experience to him, which will also be more conducive to the development of your future work.

If this is a question that the marketing and communications department asks itself, or a question that management asks, then it is a good question and it is worth brainstorming as a team: How do you measure the value of the marketing and communications department?

If we add two words before "measure", the question becomes: How to scientifically measure the value of the marketing and communications departments ?

To zoom out a bit, this question arises against the backdrop of a whole trend in marketing and communications from empirical to scientific.

01

As early as 10 years ago, the marketing and communication industry experienced a golden age of development. All the famous foreign 4A advertising companies opened branches in China, and countless small advertising creative companies were acquired by large 4A advertising companies, so that the founders achieved financial freedom. I really have such friends around me, and I am lucky to witness it all.

I once worked for Wunderman Thompson, a top domestic advertising company, for four years. The sponsor was rich, the advertising company had no shortage of clients, and it was overwhelmed with orders. Its sales doubled in one year. This seems incredible today when business is so difficult and survival is a problem, but this is the industry dividend brought about by the times.

Marketing communications in that era were based on "creativity". The creative department was the core department that generated revenue. Several people with brains would brainstorm together to come up with flexible ideas, and then logically package the ideas into proposals to clients. The clients would then slap their thighs and say, "This is a good idea, I like it."

Then the business is done, and clients are willing to pay hundreds of thousands or even millions for such a good idea. Then they work with the production company to implement the idea, and both the advertising company and the production company reap the rewards. I once talked with a founder of an advertising company, and she said: At that time, I didn’t expect that money would be so easy to make, so I recruited more people, pitched more clients, and made more money.

However, now things have completely changed. There are fewer and fewer sponsors who are willing to pay simply for creativity. The quality of creativity is usually judged based on empiricism. As the nature of marketing communication moves from experience to science, sponsors want "data". Everything is based on data, and seeing the actual results has become the main demand of brand owners.

So we have the question at the beginning of the article: How to scientifically measure the value of marketing and communication departments? It is a question of how to quantify value. In the current academic circle, the mainstream research methods for marketing and management research must be quantitative, using data to prove your point of view, and the same is true in practice.

Unfortunately, not all marketers, or even management, realize how important data is now and will become even more important in the future. Let’s do some statistics to see how many positions of data analysts or data scientists are set up in marketing and communication departments? Probably no more than 50%.

Not to mention collecting information from data, mining insights, finding information that is helpful to the business and making use of it. This is even more of a technical job. Without a proficient grasp of the business and a high sensitivity to data, it is difficult to become a qualified data analyst.

This ability is not only needed by data analysts, but also by managers or leaders of enterprises. Data analysts may provide reports based on the data itself, mining information from dimensions such as data change trends, peaks and troughs, concentration, and dispersion. What managers observe from the data is more about the reasons behind data changes under higher-dimensional influencing factors such as corporate business strategies and decisions, market environment, and macro policies, thereby helping them to draw more rational and correct conclusions and formulate future business principles and policies.

This is just like how although most CEOs do not have a finance background, they must learn to read financial statements.

Collecting information, mining insights, and using data not only determine the effect of the next wave of marketing activities, but more importantly, it can help decision makers make the right decisions in a scientific way. This decision can be a budget investment allocation decision, a placement decision, or a product production and R&D decision, or a personnel organization adjustment decision. These decisions determine all aspects of the company's operations.

There is no doubt that this question is worth thinking about for managers and marketers: How to scientifically measure the value of marketing and communication departments? To answer this question, we actually need to do further disassembly.

02

The first step is to break down the functions of the marketing and communication departments. For example, the communication department is responsible for the company's public relations affairs, such as issuing press releases and interviewing senior executives. There are also brand marketing departments, digital marketing departments, and event departments. The measurement systems for the subordinate functional departments are naturally different.

Obviously, the digital marketing department has an advantage in value measurement. Digital marketing is naturally linked to "data". The marketing behaviors, user interaction behaviors, and marketing effects of each marketing touchpoint can be digitally marked, monitored, and attributed. The digital marketing tools currently on the market can complete these measurement tasks well and can be tracked all the way to the final sales and repurchase stages.

But even so, due to the complexity of user journeys and decision-making patterns, it is impossible to complete end-to-end attribution and monitoring 100%, so the value of the digital marketing department is actually underestimated, and the sales department is the biggest beneficiary.

So, is it possible for traditional event and brand marketing departments to achieve this kind of scientific measurement?

There is definitely a way, which is to digitize the work of traditional event departments and brand marketing departments. What does it mean? For example, the event department can digitize traditional exhibitions and digitize the event format by building cloud booths and live broadcasts.

Firstly, from the user experience dimension, users who cannot be present at the site can remotely experience the grand occasion and feel as if they are there, regardless of geographical restrictions. Secondly, through a series of marketing behaviors that provide good experiences and attract users to retain information, user behavior tags and user data can be recorded through digital means. Later, when it comes to sales conversion, the source of leads can be recorded. Then, sales attribution can naturally be quantified to the number of customer conversions, the amount of business opportunities, and even sales revenue.

This may be the most complex and worthy of discussion topic for brand marketing functions.

Traditional brand marketing effectiveness measurement is usually obtained by consulting companies through user sampling surveys. For example, questionnaires and interviews are conducted on sampled customers and target audiences on issues such as brand awareness, preference, and purchasing behavior to obtain their views on the brand. The effectiveness of a brand marketing campaign can be determined by tracking whether a brand marketing campaign has changed user perceptions.

However, from a methodological point of view, I think this kind of survey is actually somewhat biased. For example, the sampling samples do not provide specific explanations, and the different conclusions drawn by different users at two different time points will also lead to random errors.

So is there a better way? The answer is definitely yes. I don’t have a perfect answer here, but I think we can also consider it from the perspective of digital brand marketing, brand marketing activities through social media.

For example, if you update WeChat public accounts, Douyin account content, digital media placement, etc., you can obtain relevant content interaction data and advertising effectiveness data, and follow the same logic as digital marketing in lead conversion and data monitoring. What is different about brand marketing is that brand marketing will take a longer period of time to produce results due to its characteristics. Therefore, the collection and tracking of this data needs to be carried out over a longer period of time and continuous tracking.

In addition to the obvious data that can be captured, such as user retention and user interaction, it is also necessary to consider the views of other stakeholders on the brand, such as whether employee interaction has increased? Whether the satisfaction of partners has increased? These may be significant results brought about by brand marketing.

Therefore, compared with the measurement of performance marketing and single marketing activities, brand marketing is a more complex issue and is constantly evolving. The measurement methods are constantly evolving with the upgrading of digital marketing technologies, which deserves the continued attention and in-depth thinking of all marketing practitioners.

03

To sum up, here are some of the points I mentioned in this article:

1. In the digital age, marketing and communication are highly integrated and fully converged.
2. There are fewer and fewer sponsors willing to pay simply for good ideas, especially when the ideas are based on subjective judgment.
3. As marketing communications transition from the era of experience to the era of science, they need to speak with "data".
4. If the sales department asks you in a challenging way, "What is the value of the marketing department?", don't pay attention. Salespeople who ask you this question in an inquiring and learning manner must have basic marketing knowledge, and people who have both sales experience and marketing knowledge are likely to become executives in the future.
5. The core of the importance of marketing science lies in that it can help managers make more correct and rational decisions in a scientific way.
6. When it comes to how to scientifically measure marketing value, digital marketing departments have a natural advantage because digital marketing work is naturally inseparable from data.
7. Brand marketing and traditional offline marketing can also be scientifically measured through digital means. One of the secrets is to adopt digital means to carry out these activities and digitize the marketing form.
8. Measuring brand marketing systems is a complex topic, but it is bound to evolve along with the upgrading of digital marketing technologies. It is worth repeated reflection by marketers, who must maintain a long-term mindset.

Author: Zhu Jingyu, WeChat public account: Jade Digital Marketing