It’s tempting to think about marketing measurement like it’s about the finish line.
We measure the number of customers who made it over a particular line: Like buying the product, signing up for our newsletter, or filling out the lead contact form.
We might try to look back at what happened before they did that, to optimize our conversion rate, but at the end of the day we’re still thinking about some sort of binary metric. We succeeded or we did not. They bought/signed up/reached out, or they did not.
The issue with this is that we deny ourselves the feedback loop.
We deny ourselves the insight that crossing that line is merely a piece of feedback that could, should, and can feed back into our marketing loop.
What this means is we need to consider that prospects who become customers, followers, or leads still represent a marketing audience. They’re still people we need to market to, they haven’t been spat out the bottom of the marketing funnel.
They’re still at a distance from our business on the Rangefinder:
They’re Here.
And our job at the Distance of Here is to exercise intense and frequent curiosity about how they measure and perceive our value.
Why?
So we can make sure they’re experiencing an overdelivery of that value. So they tell others about us.
See how that works?
They’re still part of the marketing loop, they haven’t crossed a finish line. We market the experience they’re having back to them, and they tell others about how we exceeded their expectations.
Bringing yet more people into range of our marketing efforts.
Seen this way, marketing never ends, not unless we want it to. It persists, in an endless and ever-improving loop.
One where we get better at perceiving the experience of value our best clients receive, and one where we extend the range of our marketing efforts by feeding those experiences back into our messages.
We’re participants in a feedback loop, not distant or omniscient observers.
So if your marketing measurement is struggling or steering you off course, remember:
Measurement is a loop, not a line.
And you’re in it.
Kelford Inc. is the marketing team that’s never at a loss for words. If you’re struggling with what to say and where to say it to attract ideal clients, we’ll show you the way.