Brand & BI’s Excellent Adventure
By Katie Allen, Director of Creative + Design, Capax Global
If you aren’t familiar with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted are high school buddies starting a band and about to fail their history class. They begin their Excellent Adventure with help from Rufus, a traveler from a future where their band is the foundation for a perfect society. With the use of Rufus’ time machine, Bill and Ted travel to various points in history, returning with important figures to help them complete their final history presentation.
What does that have to do with Business Intelligence (BI) and Brand? Well, much like Bill and Ted, business’s insights can fail unless they are able to build and articulate their most excellent report.
You might think I’m crazy for making such an odd correlations here, but stick with me, I believe there are three big Marketing lessons we can learn from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Lesson 1: Be Ready for an Adventure
Bill and Ted were ready to hop in a phone booth and go for a ride with a total stranger. An adventure can take you places you never thought you could go and build a beautiful story. It is important to tap into your imagination and fully engage your creativity when creating content, but you will also need to leverage your analytical skill when it’s time to evaluate ROI or ROMI (Return On Marketing Investment). BI is essential to aligning your marketing with your company’s goals.
Where does your adventure begin? There’s an insane amount of marketing metrics to aggregate, and they may not all be in the data set you need to find the business value. According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 19 percent of marketers rate their organization as “excellent” or “very good” at aligning metrics to their content marketing goals. Meanwhile, only 54 percent of top performers consider themselves excellent or very good. How do you put a story together when your story line is jumping all over the place?
I know that everyone has different goals and the road to get there is not going to be the same for everyone. For Marketing, it’s important to select metrics that align with your vision of what business goals look like. Everyone from your technology, analytics, and strategy teams should have access to your marketing progress in order to understand how it applies to their business unity. With everyone onboard with your excellent adventure you can all work together to achieve ROI and scaling your marketing program starts to become a lot easier.
Lesson 2: Better Together
The two main characters of our adventure Brand (Bill) and BI (Ted)— often times they struggle on their own. But what happens when they start to work together? As a B2B marketer it can be a true struggle to measure brand effectiveness. To measure brand equity and brand reputation we need to get into our phone booth time machine and start rounding up the business intelligence, data, metrics, statistics, that really matter.
Let’s meet our first hero, Brand
Brand is a personality, it represents the relationships between customers, staff, partners, investors, and so forth. “A brand is created when a company EARNS the right to have a relationship with their customer.” (Forbes)
Now that we know what brand is we can start to measure brand equity. I believe it can be broken down into three components (1) Awareness , (2) Perception, and (3) Loyalty.
Awareness: Brand Awareness is the level of familiarity consumers have with a particular brand. Maybe its name, mission statement, logo, colors, its services, and anything else that might be strongly associated with it. It is the ability to recognize a brand without any words. Fun fact: A signature color can boost brand recognition by 80 percent (Color Matters).
Perception: Have you ever walked into a room and felt like everyone was staring at you and wondered what they were thinking? Are they checking out your outfit or do you have ketchup on you face? Wouldn't it be nice to know you have someone by your side at all times. Brand perception is what people think about you or your company; it is what they say about your company when you’re not in the room.
Loyalty: I want you to think about the best date you have ever been on. You have a magical connection, sparks are flying, when they move you move, you just want time to stop and be with them forever… it is just meant to be. Moments after the date ends you have to call your best friend and tell them all about how amazing you new boo is. Time goes on — a relationship builds and suddenly you realize you are meant to be together forever. In my mind this is the foundation of what Loyalty is. Loyalty at the brand level is finding that pair of jeans that makes you feel like a million bucks. It is finding the brand of water that you actually CRAVE. It is going to a car dealership because your parents bought from that car dealership and you trust them. Brand Loyalty = Brand Love!
Let’s meet our second hero, BI
A lot of business leaders are monitoring metrics but BI has nothing to do with website data and statistics instead it has to do with efficiency, revenue growth and success of a business. In its most basic form, BI encompasses the analysis of a company’s raw data and analytics, to produce action items. These data points might include sales, customer experience or operations costs. With more data at our hands, BI is critical to making informed business decisions.
We can use engagement metrics to measure impact. The best place to start is with the business objective, not the channel or tactic. Here is an outline of how marketers can measure BI:
- Define the business objective
- Map the data to the opportunities
- Track all engagement metrics
- Time each engagement, if possible
- Weigh engagement actions by time
- Sum total time across a given campaign
- Choose metrics that enable timing and weighting
The downside about BI is that no single metric capture the full adventure, you will need a composite view. Metrics are not easy to gather, requiring specialized tools and surveys. Patience is required when looking for BI, seeing results takes time which leads nicely into our next lesson!
Lesson 3: Celebrate the Little Things
Whenever Bill and Ted would have a moment of excellence they would take a moment to celebrate with air guitar. A lot of times I think businesses are looking the 31,000 foot level view instead of taking a moment to appreciate the small wins. If you are a marketer and need some help finding the little things here are some ways to get started:
- Give back — your brand is only as good as your customer think it is, send a quick thank you and show your customers some appreciation.
- Be a cheerleader — sometimes its not about you having a win but about supporting and motivate your team to have a win.
- Communicate the vision—define, develop, articulate, and communicate the vision. Transparency is seen as trust.
- Make a list—mark things off while you make progress, checking things off of a list has a sense of personal satisfaction.
- Set your team up for success—put people in a position to meet and exceed their goals and when they do celebrate it!
Summary
No company wants to miss out on a new opportunity, but how can you make sure that you know where the opportunity is coming from and measuring where you are successful? Careful analysis of your data will help you understand your customer journey and even give you the power to better detect what your customers would like in the future. From predictive analytics to data that reveals service gaps, BI has the power to help companies link customer experience to operational improvements.
Bill: Socrates –“The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.” Ted: That’s us, dude.
