DM-Style Metrics Can Help Your Branding Efforts Measure Up

It’s no secret that today many brand marketers are taking cues from direct marketers. They’re making their campaigns measurable and discovering the power of segmenting, tracking and testing.

But is this “measurable marketing” talk just a knee-jerk reaction to a poor economy? Not for those who’ve practiced direct marketing for decades — and certainly not since the emergence of the Web and other trackable e-communication channels. Today “direct branding” is the norm, as opposed to the exception, for marketing professionals. And this includes those traditional branders who in the past focused on using big-impact media campaigns. They’re borrowing tools like audience profiling and modeling, segmentation strategies, and test matrix development to integrate offers and metrics into every campaign to gauge results.

Try direct branding

“Direct brand” marketers are perfectly positioned today to capture more market share from businesses that aren’t necessarily interested in direct mail or direct response channels.

Take a recent new toothbrush product launch, for example. Where’s the first place you’d expect to see a household brand introduce you to a fabulous innovation in oral care? TV. But that’s not necessarily the case these days. Procter & Gamble recently successfully launched its Oral-B Pulsonic toothbrush without using television. By clearly understanding this unique product’s niche audience, the marketers devised a campaign that wouldn’t appeal to a mass audience. So why advertise to a mass audience on TV?

Rather, P&G used a major event, New York’s Fashion Week, and public relations to make a splash among its targeted “fashionista” segment, which translated into coverage among fashion and style blogs and mainstream newspapers, and sales that exceeded expectations. Now the company is looking at the same formula to pitch its Old Spice body scrubber and the new and improved version of its Febreze air fresheners.

Cutting the traditional :30 TV spot and traditional media buy is one way to reduce a budget and free up dollars for media options that offer better analytics. Any campaign executed via the Internet will easily make the top of this list. While TV can be effective, it is expensive and, for many marketers, a wasteful investment — reaching mass audiences who do not fit the target audience profile. Done right, online communications can reduce the amount of “wastage” found in traditional media.

E-metrics to the rescue

Almost all emerging media is trackable and testable to a greater extent than traditional media. As analytics advance and become easier and faster to use, testing is becoming more commonplace. Producing and tracking results, which almost everyone involved in marketing now demands, can easily be accomplished with e-mail, Web sites and microsites, social media and blogs/micro-blogs. Even PR, which can be very measurable, is shifting to more e-centric channels to better gauge results.

Kimberly-Clark recently launched its Huggies Pure & Natural line of diapers, targeting environmentally conscious Gen Y moms. The company bypassed TV and advertised on mommy blogs as well as in parenting magazines, knowing that many young mothers research pregnancy online. Where 10 years ago TV would have gobbled up the lion’s share of budget for this new product launch, today the company opted to invest in free diaper samples for its targeted blogging moms.

This type of direct branding allows advertisers to be more precise about whom they reach, and also to test more aggressively to see what’s working and what’s not prior to a campaign roll-out. It minimizes risk, and the data that comes back is more quantifiable and accurate. Ultimately, the program often costs less and has a better return on marketing investment (ROMI).

This approach will be used more and more — for both B-to-C and B-to-B marketers — as targeting and analytics become even more sophisticated, especially for new product introductions and re-branding initiatives.

Next Page: Learn from success

Previous Page: E-metrics to the rescue

Learn from success

Overall, you want to combine the art of traditional branding and the immediacy of direct marketing to produce measured, tracked, analyzed and tested results. What you’re striving for is incremental success that continuously helps feed the marketing cycle for ongoing innovation and improvement.

The shift from traditional advertising or marketing to direct branding will help you confidently point to measurable marketing milestones and outcomes. Whereas branding and the classic direct marketing used to be separate disciplines, the two have discovered that they need to merge. Marketing accountability becomes the norm and is absolutely necessary to compete and survive in this day.

If you consider who is making money deep in the current recession, it’s those direct branders who have a hyper-testing approach to marketing: Amazon, Netflix and Capital One, to name a few. Taking the lead from these businesses, brand marketers should be predicting behavior, measuring outcomes and applying knowledge gained, now and for the foreseeable future.

Today, branding and measurement are not mutually exclusive. Great branders understand that they need to add the measurement metric of direct marketing to their work in order to prove ROI. The C-suite expects marketing to show a positive impact to the bottom line, and those marketers that can will not only survive, but thrive.

Grant A. Johnson is the founder of Brookfield, Wisconsin-based Johnson Direct LLC. ([email protected])