Is Your Marketing Effective?

It's a simple question that never has a simple answer.

As more of the marketing space is taken up by AI, zero-click searches, and social media made to enrage, brand is becoming more necessary than ever.

But how do you measure the efficacy of brand?

This has been the question that pushed so many leaders to over rotate on performance marketing. With performance marketing, we can see that if you put a dollar into the machine, you'll get two dollars back.

But with brand, it's much harder to measure, so it's harder to quantify the results. How can you tell if your brand marketing is effective?

You have to look at the long-term growth of the business.

What do Marketing Leaders Think?

The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs just released new research, and this year, they're taking a different approach.

Instead of just talking about trends in marketing and content marketing, this year's report looks at the results through the lens of effectiveness.

Over the past 12 months, here is how marketing leaders describe the effectiveness of their work:

• 12% say they're highly effective (exceeded goals).
• 47% say they're somewhat effective (met most goals).
• 31% say they're neutral (mixed results).
• 7% say they're somewhat ineffective (fell short of most goals).
• 3% say they're highly ineffective (failed to meet goals).

Tools or People?

The report goes on to say that while people are important to making change, adding headcount isn't a high priority.

Rather than augment their teams, businesses are planning for teams to get better at their jobs. I wonder how much of this is due to the poor job market for white collar workers (I know this can be debated based on which news you watch, but I can tell you that it's not a great job market for some folks). Leaders can make better defined future plans knowing their people are unlikely to leave for a new opportunity.

Teams get better at their jobs with time. AI wasn't seen as a deciding factor, but it could show some gaps in capabilities.

The strategy behind marketing and content marketing was seen as a major driver for improvements. This isn't driven by a tool, but rather leaders having better understanding of what the audience, and the business needs. The technology was used to sharpen those strategies, but the human had to do the work in the first place.

As Robert Rose, author of the report says, "tools don't erase fundamentals." The basics of marketing are still needed, even with all of the "gains" that AI is supposedly creating.

While productivity continues to grow thanks to AI, the performance (efficiency) isn't growing with it.

So, What's Effective?

Brand marketing is going to be driven by people, not AI. In many ways, it's also the antidote to AI. Your job as a marketer is to convince the higher ups that they're not going to easily measure the efficacy of brand.

It's no different than design. Great marketing design doesn't necessarily lead to more sales. But it helps the audience take you more seriously.

You'd never buy a medical device if the box was drawn by a toddler. Spending extra to improve the design will help the customer take you seriously. Which means their odds of buying your product goes up. Which leads to more sales.

It's not a simple 1+1=2 equation. But with the right story, you can explain to leadership that 1+X=3.