Adapt and Survive - It's All In The Numbers

With the array of platforms and devices marketing and advertising professionals have at their disposal it's quite easy to get carried away with buzzwords. Meetings will rage on, expanding follower bases and increasing traffic will be the topics and the net result will inevitably be questionable. Whilst these headline figures look pretty and fill your heart with joy. Let us ask a serious question, what do they mean to the business? Are these headline figures having an effect on sales or your proposed target? In fact are they having a noticeable effect at all, other than the extra few figures on your like count?

In addition to the problem of deciphering headline figures, we have all at some point realised that we work in an industry that is heavily qualitative. Questions arise from this problem such as, how do you quantify design success? What web layout is more suitable to the eye of the audience?

A solution to all of our analysis woes comes in the form of in-depth quantitative measures. By utilising statistics and analysis suites we bring back the ability to produce measures of progress and return to the client with a method of “proving your worth”. Enabling quantitative suites allows you to wear your Facebook reach and virality as if it were a badge from Scouts.

Furthermore the feedback received from said quantitative measures means that future boundaries can be pushed and expanded in such a manner than is accurate with what customers are expecting from you and your site. For instance, “optimizely” offers site optimisation software designed to offer the customer variants of your site to gauge your users preferences. This turns the qualitative idea of design into a strictly quantitative measure that can be adapted and changed to improve click throughs and other key performance indicators.

This, in very short, results in you being able to turn people into sales. The statistics will be key measures of efficiency and will be comparable month to month. There will be no shooting in the dark ever again, advertising and likes will be quantifiable and hopefully targetable in terms of actions.

Marketing, like all other industries is adapting to survive. Quantitative measures are not only allowing marketing to be measured effectively in terms of performance but they are allowing a price to be accurately placed on data and the opinions of us all.

This concept of changing to suit the needs of the market is not new and I hope that this does not read as if statistics in marketing is exactly that. However, this is merely a reiteration of common consensus in terms of the social revolution. You are only as good as your numbers.