Meaningful outcomes that drive your business are at the core of marketing planning at WS. Our work isn’t successful unless our clients are successful, so we start every marketing plan with a clear understanding of what success looks like for you and what you want your marketing to achieve. WS’s Group Director, Strategy & Performance, Carla Howden, talks about the benefits of outcome-driven strategies and how this approach drives results for our clients.
Outcome marketing begins with the end in mind – what is the client trying to achieve? Starting there, we consider the specifics of the client’s business, what’s going on out in the marketplace, and what we know about our client’s audience, and we essentially work backwards from the client’s goals to figure out the best marketing plan to get there.
When we talk to clients, it’s all about what they’re trying to achieve and how we can deliver it for them. Clients love this approach because it aligns with how they think and what they need from their agency, and it’s different from what they often hear.
Other agencies focus on the what and the how – the latest marketing tactics, the big creative idea. Outcome marketing focuses on goals. We won’t put forward a tactic or a concept unless we think it will generate measurable, relevant results, which means all our clients’ marketing efforts (and marketing dollars) go toward driving their business.
We’ve all heard the John Wanamaker’s quote, “‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Wanamaker might have put up with that 100 years ago, but clients today aren’t willing to waste half their marketing budgets.
It’s not enough for us to run a campaign only to find out at the end that it didn’t achieve what it was supposed to (or worse, that we don’t know what it achieved at all!). Marketers want to understand how their marketing supports their business goals and bottom line in real-time.
Because we plan from the outset what our marketing is supposed to achieve for our clients, we can monitor and optimize throughout the life of the campaign. We measure everything we do right from launch through to wrap-up, and we keep our clients informed every step of the way. If something isn’t working or something changes in the marketplace or within the client’s business, we pivot to ensure we deliver the best possible result.
The terms “data” and “insights” are often used interchangeably, but there’s a critical distinction. And it’s the insight we look for when developing outcome-driven strategies.
The difference between data and insights is relevance. For example, you might know where your target audience lives, their average income, and whether they’re married and have kids. You might know their political beliefs, religion, health habits or what they like to read. But does that have anything to do with your product? If not, then it’s not an insight.
An insight is a problem, opportunity, or tension for your audience that your product or company can help solve. Data analysis can help us turn data into insights by finding patterns and connections that uncover tensions or opportunities, pointing us toward the right tactics or messaging to connect with our audience.
The success of outcome-driven strategies is determined by the quality of insights we use in the process. Customer insights come from a lot of different places. One great source of information is our clients – they usually know their customers’ priorities, pain points, behaviours and beliefs around their brand and products better than anyone else.
We also get a lot of information from how our audiences interact with our marketing campaigns. For example, we see what kinds of content they interact with, what messages resonate, what media platforms they use, and lots more. We can layer onto that with information from third-party market research or conduct first-party research and analysis to really dig deep into our audience’s needs and their relationship with our clients’ products, brands, and industries.
Once we have all that information, we consolidate it and analyze it for specific key insights that are relevant to the customer’s decision-making process. This lets us understand how to connect with them at different stages to move them along the marketing funnel for our clients.
The two biggest challenges of outcome marketing are time and focus, and they’re kind of related.
The first issue we often encounter is that outcome marketing takes more time upfront. You have to spend the time to understand what you’re trying to achieve, understand your audience, build a strategy and figure out how you will measure success. This can be difficult for clients or other stakeholders eager to see something out in the marketplace immediately. They can feel like the planning takes too long.
But, in my experience, when we skip the planning, we often have to spend time and money fixing problems later because we haven’t thought everything through, and the marketing tactics aren’t designed properly to achieve the client’s goals.
In marketing, there’s always a new way of doing things, a shiny new tactic or a creative direction we could pursue. But the idea behind outcome marketing is that we focus on our objective and don’t just chase after every trend. This can be difficult because a lot of these shiny ideas are exciting, and we want to do and try something new. But if it doesn’t serve the end goal, we shouldn’t do it, no matter how exciting it is.
This doesn’t mean outcome marketing is rigid or that the plan can’t change. If the market conditions change, we get new information about our client’s business, or if we see that a particular tactic isn’t performing how we want it to, we’ll adapt. But those are purposeful changes based on improving our ability to hit our goals, not just because we want to try something new.
Outcome-driven marketing is the practice of beginning at the end. It’s about focusing on more than cool marketing tactics or creative ideas – it centers on driving real results that matter for our client’s business.
With an outcome approach, our clients get to allocate their marketing dollars better and focus their efforts on what will make a difference to their business.
Connect with us to leverage the skills and knowledge Carla and the rest of the WS team offer for the marketing success of your project.
Carla's mix of client-side and agency experience has given her a holistic understanding of strategic marketing challenges. But most will say her ability to mentally track multiple elements on dozens of projects in real-time is her true superpower. When she’s not busy planning her next tropical vacation, Carla wonders what really makes people tick.
