What is Your Objective?

Let's zoom out from sports and sponsorship to look at marketing more broadly.

The need to measure your marketing has come a long way since early advertising. The requirements to demonstrate ROI or effectiveness have only intensified for the mainstream since AdWords and other data-rich platforms have been opened up to marketers around the world in every industry.

These platforms inundated us with data we didn't know was possible and certainly didn’t think we needed. They backed it all up with fancy ratios and a new dictionary of lingo such as CPM, CPC, CTR, Quality Scores and other scientific-sounding things. The rules were re-written with the digital space.

As more data came in, industries started developing "benchmarks" for every little thing. That is to say if you run a retail business and you were not hitting a 3.5% Click Through Rate on your digital ad campaigns, then you must have been failing. Or, maybe you were succeeding at that same rate based on another arbitrary point aof view.

Marketing is just not that simple.

Another rule rewrite came with all of us becoming obsessed with reaching specific numbers that looked good in Excel and according to other benchmarks set outside of our business. After all the tweaks, copy changes, image adjustments and other minute things to focus on we celebrate beating our benchmark.

But, then what? Did your business dramatically change? Did you sell more stuff, develop something innovative or shift the perception in your desired audience? Or maybe you just "reached your number."

Over time, we have begun spending more energy and time hitting generically prescribed metrics that may or may not matter for your business. If we take the majority of this energy and instead apply it to understanding what we want to accomplish, we will develop great work.

How do you identify what to focus on?

• What is your objective?

• Did your boss set that objective for you? If so, what are their objectives?

• Did you have to create your own?

No matter where your objective comes from...forget impressions, forget views and for a moment forget what everyone is telling you to measure. Pretend no data is available and visualize your end goals for this initiative. Work backward from what will get you there, step by step.

Before you start, think of the end.