KPIs for Cause Marketers

If you ask a regular marketer what his KPIs are he may have a handful. But ask a digital marketer what her key performance indicators and she may have 100 or more. The reason, said Jeff A. Allen, a product marketer at Adobe Marketing Cloud at an American Marketing Association meeting yesterday is that digital marketing generates a huge pile of data that can be efficiently cross-tabulated in countless ways. Consequently, all marketing is becoming ever more analytical and more scientific since you can easily and quickly test hypotheses about what works and what doesn’t.

Which prompts the question for cause marketers, what are your KPIs?

Ignore, for the moment, the fact that your cause marketing campaigns may not currently be digital; how do you measure its success?

You can start with the obvious; dollars raised, sales, impressions generated, media value of said impressions, and number of participants. But you can and should go deeper.

Because, as Allen put it, if you can’t document your contributions in measurable metrics then why should your company... or your sponsor... keep you around?

What else could offline cause marketers measure? Assuming your cause marketing a physical product, you could measure inventory turns, the cost of the promotion vs. non-cause marketing promotions, reorders, the enthusiasm of your channel for the promotion, customer satisfaction, amount of shrinkage, returns rate, etc.

Digital marketers may have it easier, but they don’t have a monopoly on meaningful KPIs.

So, cause marketers, what are your KPIs?

Comments

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