Is Our Messaging Getting Lost In Our Medium?

Rampant and overwhelming communication, misunderstanding of statistics or other factors can distract agency teams from delivering clear communications to their marketer clients. More and more, marketers seeking to improve performance marketing programs look to both campaign data and effective communication to determine success. A failure to balance comprehensive, yet concise communication with strong metric-based results can spell doom for any performance marketing effort.

Tons of texts, tweets and trivial numbers

The fast pace of modern communications can be overwhelming. According to All Things Digital and the CTIA’s 2009 semiannual wireless industry survey, 4.1 billion texts were sent per day in the U.S. in the first half of 2009, double the number sent during the first half of 2008.

While most of this is consumer-to-consumer dialogue, texting, tweets and posts have affected a whole new generation of marketing communicators. A key constituency of this fast-paced, text-driven world is the talented performance marketers at work in our industry today. As countless businesses—digital or otherwise—attempt to keep their rising stars on track, now is the time to reinforce the expectation of and need for clear internal and external communications.

In addition to communication overload, our society’s growing statistics illiteracy may also contribute to agency/marketer miscommunications. Wired highlighted this issue in an April 19 article, “Clive Thompson on Why We Should Learn the Language of Data.” In the story, Thompson cites climate change, the economy, childhood vaccination and other hotly debated topics as “examples of how our inability to grasp statistics—and the mother of it all, probability—makes us believe stupid things.”

CMOs and performance marketing agencies need to be attentive to these tera bytes and sound bites, which, when combined with lackluster communication, can make life difficult for performance marketers. This is particularly true when good communication takes a back seat to a relentless focus on numbers. When that happens, we all begin to lose appreciation for the full, clear communications that must support these campaigns.

Soft skills in a hard skills world

The best results and most glowing metrics can be lost altogether if marketers and agencies don’t have the soft skills required to communicate them clearly. Even with numbers that are off the charts, a lack of understanding can derail campaigns and strain agency/advertiser relationships.

Considering the relatively recent arrival of metric-based performance marketing, it’s unfortunate that many in the industry have allowed their writing, presentation and other communication skills to decline. This likely reflects a larger societal problem, but the effects are real across the board and impact the performance marketing discipline.

Marketers and agencies cannot ignore the importance of constantly improving soft skills, across all levels of an organization from account planners and managers to C-suite executives. At a very basic level, agencies must ensure they train their people on more than just the latest technology tools and analytic reports. Soft skills and business training should be a part of every agency’s regimen to keep marketer/agency communications on track.

Best practices to consider

In addition to grooming and growing soft skills, consider these best practices to avoid pitfalls and keep marketer/agency communications on track:
• Conduct twice yearly audits to ensure campaigns have clearly defined positioning statements, objectives, strategies, tactics and key performance indicators in place
• Focus audits on the structure of campaign communications, project briefs and report cards, in addition to the program metrics themselves
• Ensure a clear understanding when requesting or delivering recommendations or proposals; some agencies aren’t taking the time to understand what marketers want
• Lose the jargon: explain outcomes in plain English so they make sense to a wide range of marketers and executives throughout the company
• Confirm the numbers and analyses that matter: whether objectives changed or something was misunderstood, agree on the metrics that matter before analyzing them
• Avoid silo communication: many campaigns have multiple stakeholders; agencies must ensure that metrics and communications serve them all

Michael Kahn ([email protected]) is senior vice president of client services at Performics and a monthly contributor to Chief Marketer.