CEOs are beginning to question the analytics used by marketers to target campaigns, and instead want what they feel is a clearer link to business goals.
Research from behavioral targeting platform Bango, in which more than 200 CEOs were quizzed, found that 55% consider digital marketing metrics “meaningless” if they aren’t directly associated with sales. Nearly two thirds (62%) of CEOs also feel that too much marketing budget is wasted on activities that don’t deliver meaningful results, while 77% expect marketing to have a measurable impact on their business’ bottom line.
The Bango report argues that digital marketing has lost its way, with many marketers trying to disguise poor results behind a haze of “meaningless metrics” that aren’t relevant to the board.
According to Bango, CEOs have become bored of hearing about tactical analytics such as retweets (76%), likes (65%), followers (64%) and impressions (66%), and instead want to see marketers presenting results that tie digital marketing directly to the bottom line.
To address this issue, Bango’s Board to Death report suggests that marketers should focus less on using social media to gain likes and followers, and instead use it to collect insights into what customers actually buy.
Anil Malhotra, CMO at Bango, said: “When working on digital marketing campaigns, it’s very easy to get bogged down in generating as much engagement as possible – but if that engagement doesn’t tie back to sales then it quickly becomes a huge drain on company resources. CEOs are picking up on this fact, and they want to know that their growing digital marketing budgets are being well spent.
“The best way to overcome this is through better targeting. Rather than running campaigns based on what people like or share on social media, brands need to target potential customers based on their previous purchase behaviours. A lot of marketers don’t realise that you can do this type of targeting on social media, but it’s by far the best way to secure paying customers and tie your social media efforts back to the business’ bottom line.”
To achieve this, Bango’s report advocates the adoption of ‘Purchase Behaviour Targeting’, a niche targeting function introduced by platforms like Facebook, which can be supplemented with past purchasing data from around the internet.
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