Hey friends, in today's email we will be discussing:
Preparing for the Holidays: How can we get ready for the success of the holiday season? Start preparing now.
Vanity Metrics: What are they, and how do you look at the right metrics for business success?
Maximize Your Holiday Impact: From Strategy to Execution
Let’s talk about planning. I mean, yes, it’s only August, but time flies! This is the time to start thinking about what you’ll be doing during the holiday season. Today, I want to make sure you can prepare for the biggest season of the year.
To start, we need to know what our objective is going to be during the holiday season. Do you have a clear goal? If not, this might be the moment to talk to your director or VP to get that objective.
Based on that objective, we know what we’ll be focussing on during the sale. You might get a sales objective, which means you’ll have to come up with a strategy for the holiday season. How will you be hitting your sales objective? For this, we first need to make sure that we know who we’ll be targeting. Sure, we can just run our marketing campaigns and pray. It’ll just be easier to think about your target audience and segment within that audience.
During the holiday season, there might be people who normally don’t consider buying your product. You might want to create a separate segment for those who you’ll be approaching differently.
There is also a group of gift givers that will be in the market to buy products/services for their family/friends. This segment requires different communication vs returning/new customers.
After determining your target audiences/segments, you can start thinking about your strategy. How will you be delivering your message to these audiences/segments? You might have different types of messages for each of these audiences/segments. When determining the strategy, you describe “how will I reach this objective.” It’s a high-level explanation of how you’ll reach your target. An example would be: we’ll be using social media to get more people’s interest in the product.
When you’ve created the strategy, you can think about the tactics. Your tactics describe how things will be done. When you use social media to get more people’s attention as a strategy, your tactic would describe what channels will be used and in which capacity. For example, We’ll be using TikTok ads to share the product experience from current customers to gain product awareness.
Now that we have the tactic, we can start thinking about how we will be measuring our success. What KPIs will we be using to determine our success? And how do we know what vanity metrics are?
By writing all of this down, we can more easily work towards the goals that we have set for the holiday season. We can now also plan all the work that needs to get done by ourselves and by other departments. As this is such an important season, your creative team might get a lot of requests from different teams. You need to make sure that your creative team is aware of your plan. You need to make sure that you’re requests will get done in time.
When there are channels that you’ve never tried (TikTok, for example), you might want to test them out before the holiday season begins. Most companies have a bigger budget during the holiday season to hit objectives. Before you start spending money on new channels, you want to get initial data so you can make data-driven decisions on where to put your money.
Don’t wait too long to plan your holiday season. Look at last year’s notes, see what worked and what didn’t, and plan ahead. Make your holiday season a successful one!
Vanity Metrics: Impressive Numbers That Mislead Marketers
When I was working at a big corporation, we had town halls (company get-together presentations) every year in January to share the results from the holiday season. During this presentation, we had a senior vice president say: “We did a total of 3 billion impressions!”. They started cheering, and so did a lot of other people in the audience.
When hearing this, what do you think? Is that success?
This is what we call a vanity metric.
“Vanity metrics are statistics that look spectacular on the surface but don’t necessarily translate to any meaningful business results” source: Product Plan.
Vanity metrics are being shared by marketers who don’t have a clear objective. These vanity metrics are not only used by small businesses but also by big corporations (like the example above).
After this was shared by the senior vice president, I remember looking around with just questions. I had people come up to me and ask me: “What does that mean?”. I had no idea. You can get a ton of impressions, but they don’t mean anything. If you get a ton of impressions on your ads, but no one clicks on them or visits your website after seeing the ad, the ad wasn’t good, right? I mean, why would you want people to see something and not take any action?
The same example can be given when looking at the total traffic to your website. I never understood why people would create traffic targets. In the end, you can get a lot of traffic, but if people don’t take the desired action on your website, it’s a waste. If you hit your traffic target but over 90% of people bounce from your website, you have an issue. You might be targeting the wrong audience, or the tactics are not working as intended, or maybe your website isn’t that great.
To give you another example, what if you have to get people to download your app? All you do is look at the total amount of people that download your app, but we forget the people that uninstall right after. Maybe they had to download your app to get free credits in the game that they’ve been playing. They don’t care about your app; they just want to get the credit.
In the end, you want to measure the success of the business. You can look at the amount of traffic, but you would need to look at the data after someone visits your website. Based on that, you can make the necessary adjustments to keep improving.
If you do have a traffic target, ask what the end goal is. Do we just want traffic cause we might get people to see our ads (that’s how we make money)? Or do we have a traffic target, but the objective is to get sales? Then maybe we should look at the total amount of sales that we are doing and use traffic more as an indication than anything else. If you have achieved your sales target but didn’t hit your traffic target, it shouldn’t be a problem.
Don’t fall into the trap of sharing vanity metrics as big achievements. What business objective did you hit? Share these numbers instead and share the vanity metrics to tell the story of how you got there and what you’ll do next.
Podcast episode(s) you'd love
- Marketing Against the Grain: Everything You Need To Know About Flux.1 (MidJourney On Steroids!). Kipp and Kieran dive into the dramatic advancements in AI image generation. They share some great use cases for generative AI image generation. If you don't have a creative team at your disposal, this is a great episode.
Found any interesting articles yourself? Please share it with me, as I am always interested in learning something new.
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