Every New Year, I find myself making lofty goals: eat better, exercise more, spend less time on social media. By mid-February, those goals are a distant blip in my rearview mirror; the reality of life gets in the way, and I just fail at tracking progress.

But this year is different (I swear). I created a 19 in ‘19 list of personal and professional goals I want to accomplish. These goals are small and achievable. For example, one of my goals is to blog more to build my brand as a marketing analytics expert. I tacked my 19 in ‘19 list on my board as a constant reminder that I need to be relentless and challenge myself.

I strongly urge B2C marketing professionals responsible for marketing performance insights to create their 19 in ‘19 goal list. List out your marketing performance measurement goals this year, print it out, make it visible. Set some ground rules to make the goals SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based — and get to work!

Need ideas to help jump-start your marketing performance measurement 19 in ’19 goals? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. Below is a list of some achievable marketing measurement initiatives that you should consider conducting in 2019:

  1. Determine if your data and metrics meet MRC standards. Established in the 1960s, The Media Rating Council (MRC) seeks to: “. . . improve the quality of audience measurement by rating services and to provide a better understanding of the applications (and limitations) of rating information.” MRC sets measurement and metrics standards, promotes consistency, improves market research quality, and sets measurement best practices. If media and tech companies — such as Google, Nielsen, and Sizmek — meet measurement standards, they receive the coveted MRC rating. Vendors, such as video ad platform Innovid, claim they win deals because of MRC accreditation. In short, the MRC is critical during these times when ad fraud, viewability, and miscalculations in performance metrics (such as Facebook’s 2016 data accounting error) are all too common. Ensuring measurement standards in 2019 will help you validate the importance of all your marketing analytics and insights work . . . and it will show your obsession with metrics rigor.
  2. Build your marketing performance measurement tech stack. Martech, adtech, madtech, and now performancetech. That’s right: Marketers must have a hard look at their marketing performance measurement tech stack — the technology and data needed to facilitate a unified view of marketing performance measurement. But don’t worry: The performance tech stack may not require additional investment; it’s just an understanding of the necessary internal and third-party technologies needed for a complete picture of marketing performance — what Forrester calls unified measurement. Document your measurement goals, and create your technology and data “map” needed to cobble together more concise and complete marketing performance insights. Uncover how your existing (or future) measurement solution can connect to internal transaction systems, CRM systems, ad servers, and third-party data providers. Outline the data needed from these systems for your analysis. This laborious task is necessary for you to determine if your 2019 measurement goals are even achievable.
  3. The short and long of it: Measure marketing effectiveness beyond the sales conversion. Marketers have an insatiable need to measure marketing efforts to an immediate result, usually a sales conversion. But measuring marketing effectiveness to a specific near-term outcome often erodes those hard-to-measure longer-term metrics, such as brand value or health. Create a measurement strategy that analyzes marketing effectiveness in the short and long term. Companies like The Economist, Red Bull, and Estee Lauder all measure long-term impact of advertising by looking at how ads influence brand health or long-term financial value. Nielsen is working to build standards around creating marketing effectiveness multipliers so that marketers can measure the impact of campaigns on long-term financial metrics. So, in 2019, expand your metrics horizon by looking at longer-term effects of marketing on the business. You may be surprised to find out that tried-and-true advertising — such as television — still actually works!
  4. Add customer emotion indicators when you analyze ad effectiveness. My colleague Jim Nail is exploring how marketers will start to measure the impact of emotion on ad effectiveness. Blending hard data with psychological principles — such as intense satisfaction or displeasure — will accelerate as measurement vendors probe the predictive power of a brand’s emotional intensity against base revenue. According to our B2C marketing predictions, Nielsen’s Consumer Neuroscience will add emotional variables to its marketing performance models. Marketing Evolution and Analytic Partners will test Motista’s Emotional Connection Score or Realeyes’ EmotionAll Score for their explanatory power in predicting advertising ROI.
  5. Analyze how paid media impacts owned content. In 2019, my Forrester colleagues Jessica Liu and Collin Colburn and I will research the intersection of influence between paid media, owned content, and earned. This synergistic analysis helps marketers balance the right paid media investment with investment in their own content, maybe even resulting in a decrease of paid media and more focus on website experience, messaging, and content! Need more convincing? The Journal of Advertising Research published an academic report that analyzed 838 brands across 14 product and service categories to understand the relationship between how paid media and owned digital content influences sales. The report found that investment in digital owned media was correlated to brands’ long-term sales growth rates and to the balance between paid-media and owned-media investment. In 2019, work with your digital intelligence team and analyze the correlation between television advertising and driving traffic directly to your brand’s website. Chances are, you’ll find some opportunity to test new advertising or content on your website to tighten up the customer experience.

Shoot me an email and share your 2019 marketing performance measurement goals!

Happy New Year!