I’m between sessions at the Nevada Governor’s Global Tourism Summit, and after hearing so many fantastic speakers talking about the different things happening in the travel and tourism marketing industry, I felt compelled to write a short blog post. Everyone here has great ideas, great products, great services –everything the Silver State needs to maintain its presence as a fantastic tourism destination. But the biggest thing everyone’s been harping on is ROI. Proving that something works is the backbone for funding, for buy-in, for proving value, and especially for gaining traction with stakeholders. For that to work, it all comes down to being able to measure what matters.
Focus on the essentials.
Many marketers I’ve worked with want to track everything. Clicks, engagement, PR clips, impressions, OOH impressions, net promoter score – the list goes on. Don’t get me wrong, each of these is valuable for someone, but rarely is it all valuable for everyone.
I’m a huge fan of setting clear goals. I read about the topic a lot, I make it a priority with my clients before we begin work, and I use it in my personal life to accomplish basically anything that’s worth accomplishing. Goals keep us focused and make achievement possible, and when they’re measureable, there’s no question about what’s most important.
Use your goals to plan your measurement strategy.
A measureable goal doesn’t just guide your marketing – it also guides how you should measure ROI. If your goal is to increase visitor volume in your hotel, resort or destination, then that’s the data you should be measuring. If it’s to raise the total economic impact, or customer spend, or customer interactions per month, etc., then that’s what you need to measure.
So how do you do it? You plan a measurement strategy around your goal. This is where market research steps in. When your marketing goals are being developed, your market research team needs to be in the loop to determine how they’re going to track your marketing’s progress. The right methodology can make or break a strategy, because the right research methodology will ultimately tell you if what you’re doing is working.
Be sure it’s the right thing. Research can help.
The benefit of having your Research involved is that they can advise the strategy to measure, as well as decide if the metric you’re measuring is the right one.
Quick story – a few years ago I had a client who was measuring viability of marriages in their market. Based on their metrics, the number of marriages overall were down. Nationwide, this is actually an interesting trend, but the important thing about this story is the two metrics we measured. First, we took a look at the number of licenses issued in the market each month, which, sure enough, was down year-over-year. Second, we looked at the number of wedding chapels in the market year-over-year, and, sure enough, several had closed. Key takeaway, marriage is down.
Except that wasn’t the whole picture. What I later found was three important things:
1) Most people that got married did not do it in a wedding chapel. They found alternative venue options, which is a rising trend in that industry.
2) Not everyone who gets married gets their marriage license in this market.
3) Dollar for dollar, a lot of the businesses who provided services to the marriage industry were seeing year-over-year increases.
The takeaway? We weren’t measuring the right thing. My client made assumptions about the metrics we were measuring, and that led to the wrong conclusions. The bigger picture told a different story, and thanks to the right research, we were able to steer the client back on course by looking at different, more indicative metrics.
Hyper-focus on your chosen metrics.
Once you know what you’re measuring, and know how you’re going to measure it, it’s time to focus on those metrics hardcore. Build dashboards, measure performance, obsess, and focus on incremental change over time.
We humans love progress – it’s one of the best things we can do to stay motivated. Ongoing measurement of the right metrics will show you progress and keep your marketing team hungry and competitive.
And while you’re focusing on what’s been deemed important, you also need to ignore what isn’t. If you’re measuring visitor volume, don’t obsess over CTR. If you’re measuring net promoter, don’t obsess over PR clips. Focus on the metric that matters to you, and let that be your guiding light. Otherwise you’ll get lost in the weeds.
When to measure the little stuff.
When should you measure CTR, PR clips, etc. when those aren’t your goal? When they are your goal.
Ok, that sounds contradictory, but hear me out. In marketing, you need to also measure your tactics, and your tactics should be guided by your strategy.
Are you trying to grow visitor volume? And does PR fit into that strategy? If so, visitor volume is your overall metric for success. But if you’re the PR manager on that team, the PR clips are still your bread and butter. Why? Because the strategy has dictated that your role in the process is vital for that end result.
The great thing about goals and strategy working together is that each tactic can have its individual goals as well. When those tactics really come together as a full-blown strategy, and everyone involved achieves their tactic-based goals, the big-picture goal gets achieved. And measuring those individual tactics with the same hyper-focus, when and only when that tactic is specifically within your purview, is how everyone on the team will achieve that important incremental success.
Measure everything to gain nothing.
Remember, if you try to measure everything, you’ll gain nothing from a knowledge standpoint. You’ll get lost focusing on the wrong things, and the right ones won’t hold nearly the power that they should.
When you want it done right, pick a goal and a metric that work hand in hand, and bring in a great researcher to help guide the metric measurement process. Let that metric allow you to prove your success, and you’ll never having a problem defining the ROI of your marketing activities again.