You Ask, I Answer: Communicating Marketing Results to Non-Marketers?

In today's episode, Ali asks, Do you have any tips for sharing marketing results like social media and email marketing analytics to a non-tech savvy staff? Hmm. Well, here's the thing. Does anyone care? Um most staff in an organization are not going to be interested in marketing results unless they work in the marketing department because they've got other stuff that they're doing.

And to a non-marketing person, it's not going to be clear what marketing does that helps them with their job, right? Or that helps the organization overall succeed. People want to look at organizational results. What has happened that benefits the organization overall, or what is marketing doing that is making their life easier? So if you have somebody in finance, for example, what is what is marketing doing to impact finance in a positive way?

If it's things like donations or revenue or e-commerce sales or leads or something, uh the biggest challenge for all of us is to communicate results that mean something to the person we're talking to. One of the one of the complications we run into a lot is that we care, as we should, uh, very much about the work that we're doing and the results that we're getting. That's a good thing. We want we want to care about our jobs, right? That's uh generally accepted as a as a wonderful thing.

But nobody else does, and it's not their job to, right? It's not their role to understand our role or how what we deliver to the organization. And so we have to figure out how to transform what our results are into language that means something to them. And that means, particularly when it comes to things like marketing technology, that instead of looking for a technological solution, we have to look for a uh a human communications solution. What is the thing that that person cares about?

That may mean doing a formal exercise like KPI mapping, for example, uh, or it may just mean talking with that person and trying to understand what it is that they need. Um, there's a concept of user stories that uh my friend and uh business partner, Katie Robert talks about a lot, which is uh sort of the who, what, why? Uh, as a CFO, I need information about marketing to understand marketing's performance, right? Um, and being able to write out what it is that each person needs from marketing will greatly help out understanding uh those uh what to communicate from from the marketing activities that we're doing. Social media, email marketing results, things like that.

People probably don't care. Um, unless they need something to you know impress the board of directors with as on the assumption that the board of directors doesn't really uh know or care about those analytics either. So, what do you have that somebody else is going to care about? If you have VP of sales, then something like lead generation would be very interesting to the VP of sales, like, yeah, I need to feed my sales crew. Uh I need more leads, better leads.

You know, the old uh Glengarry Glenn Ross, uh the leads are weak. I need I need better leads. Uh being able to explain to them how you judge lead quality and things like that. To somebody in HR, uh, what is marketing doing to communicate uh things like open positions and stuff, and how if you helped feed that particular part of the website? So it's less a question of marketing technology and more a question of what is the recipient of the message going to get out of it.

Now, there are some things that you can do from a technological perspective that are better than others. Umshboards connected to real-time data sources is generally a better thing than static PowerPoints because it gives people the ability to get the results that they care about. Once you've researched that, once you've found that out, it gives them the ability to get that data better and faster and at their convenience and not yours. So you can hand them a live dashboard and say this is yours, and at any time, anytime you want to know. If you wake up at 3 a.m.

and you want to know an answer, uh you want to know about these measures, here's how you get to them. That tends to be uh something people appreciate, but it also has to be something that requires little or no training. So looking at something like say Google Data Studio uh from an end user perspective is a good tool to use because it it looks familiar and it should require very little interpretation, very, very little um explanation, which means that if you have a dashboard with like 40 things and flashing knobs and stuff all over, then that's not gonna help anybody. Generally speaking, when you look at an organization and you look at the people in it, the average person who doesn't work in marketing is probably gonna really only care about one or two marketing numbers, right? So if you're you know the HR person, you're probably really only gonna care about website traffic to the the careers part of the website, and maybe uh depending on how that your company hires, maybe you know, number of uh job applications submitted.

That's a real simple dashboard. One graph for traffic, one graphic for uh job applications, and you're done. Right? And the the person who's on the other end of that in NHRC should be able to look at that and go, I get it. Traffic to our career section is up or traffic to our career section is down.

Part of that exercise is also asking somebody, okay, of the data that I'm going to give you, what decisions are you going to make with it? Right? If I give you this information about website traffic to your section of the website going up, what decision will you make from it? If the answer is nothing, then valid question is so do you need that information? Do you need yet another email or another notification or another thing on your desk?

If all it's all it's going to do is clutter up your life more, uh or are you going to make a decision on it and say that oh gosh, uh website traffic is to the HR section is down? Okay, well, what do we do about it? Do we run some ads for our job openings? Do we send more emails? Do we increase the size of our employee referral program?

That information is what you need in order to help communicate specific marketing results. Uh same for social media, right? If you're monitoring brand reputation, you're communicating brand sentiment, what decision do you make from that? Who makes that decision? Is that something that uh belongs in marketing?

Is it something that belongs in communications? Is it something that belongs in the C suite to say, like, hey, our our company's reputation has declined by 2.5%, and it has this impact. What do you want to do about it? At the end of the day, if nobody makes a decision, the information didn't need to be communicated. Data without decisions is distraction.

Something we've said for a long time. Data without decisions is distraction. It doesn't help anything. Only data that helps you make decisions is useful. So give keep that in mind as you look at all these results and the people you're communicating them to.

What decisions are you going to make from this data? If you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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