As a commodity board or trade association, measuring the ROI of your marketing efforts isn’t always straightforward. You’re not moving product yourself, so sales (a straightforward metric) isn’t your go-to for measuring success. The metrics you generally deal with, like consumer attitude toward your product, are more intangible.
So how can you measure the ROI of your marketing efforts when it’s not as easy as connecting the dots to sales?
Marketing will impact your industry members’ bottom lines for the better. But you can’t measure the ROI of your marketing if you’re not getting a return on what matters to you and your stakeholders.To demonstrate effectiveness, it’s essential to select the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure.
When to Measure: Deciding on KPIs for Your Marketing Strategy
Before we get into what to measure, let’s talk about the how and when. Too many agencies set the marketing strategy for their commodity clients and then back into KPIs to measure their success. They latently (and often haphazardly) decide impressions or awareness are the KPIs they’ll track.
But what if impressions aren’t an important metric to you and your stakeholders?
To get to the heart of ROI, set KPIs alongside your marketing plan. After all, your KPIs measure progress against your goals and strategic objectives, and those in turn define your KPIs. Measurement and marketing plan development is — or should be — a codependent relationship.
For example, let’s say your objective is to increase consumer awareness of your product by 10%. Your strategies laddering up to that objective may look like this:
- Develop and implement integrated consumer marketing communications campaign
- Develop and implement college and university foodservice marketing program
- Develop and implement a retail marketing program
Your KPIs need to measure the impact of implementing each of the strategies above. Taken as a whole, the success of these strategies will either deliver the ROI (10% increase in consumer awareness) or they won’t. If they don’t, it’s time to adjust.
At Wild Hive, we get to the bottom of what success looks like for you and your marketing efforts. With the goals of your marketing plan at the forefront, we define objectives, strategies to reach them, tactics to execute against the strategies and KPIs to measure success.
The short of it? Goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and anticipated results should align. Period. Making sure KPIs are determined early allows the tactical approach to drive the desired results.
What to Measure: Determining the Right Metrics for You
Commodity boards aren’t directly moving product. You’re also at the mercy of outside factors — supply, seasonality, retail variations, funding fluctuations from the government, farmers, CPGs and so on. It’s a unique space that often requires a unique approach to measurement.
To that end, exploring types of measurable impact beyond sales matters. What about reputation? Intent? Engagement? Think outside the box to discover KPIs for your specific marketing goals for your specific product.
Maybe a super-pinpointed KPI will reveal you’re driving the kinds of results your industry needs — like civic-minded Californians.
Take our client the California Strawberry Commission, for example. Wild Hive was tasked with telling growers’ multigenerational stories with an emphasis on sustainability. The right media partner helped us create content that resonates with their audience while also helping us meet our client’s goals. The result? In this instance, it was a single article that performed so well it overwhelmingly outpaced all benchmark goals and is actually being used as a case study on the media partner’s website.
In this instance, it wasn’t about millions upon millions of impressions, rather, it was reaching the right people with the right message. A message so compelling website visitors spent over three minutes consuming one page of content. That was a success for California strawberries.
Benchmarks Bolster Your Food Marketing Case to Stakeholders
As we discuss KPIs and measurement to determine the ROI of your food marketing initiatives, let’s not forget about measurement’s best friend: benchmarking.
Benchmarking allows you to align around a baseline. Where are you starting and, based on industry standards and research, where should you go?
Having access to benchmarking data (and measurement in general) requires investment. You have to plan for attitude and usage studies, for instance. But expending resources on benchmarking is well worth it. With benchmarks, you can expand the way you demonstrate ROI to your stakeholders — and that’s powerful.
The Role of an Agency Partner in Getting and Measuring Results
We recognize investing in measurement doesn’t look the same for every commodity board or trade association. And that’s okay. Our team knows how to get creative when it comes to achieving and showing the ROI of your food marketing efforts.
It’s all about scaling.
At Wild Hive, we begin with a deep understanding of your needs. From there, we scale to meet your budget, strategic objectives and stakeholder requirements. Part of how we stay within your budget is by building fit-for-purpose teams to serve you. Customized, lean teams comprised of industry experts allow us to be nimble, meeting your needs within your budget.
What’s more, we’re a full-service agency with deep specialization in food marketing for commodity boards and trade associations. There’s no such thing as getting us up-to-speed on your lingo. We live it, too. Working with a full-service agency also tends to be more efficient and cost-effective than having lots of projects and remits scattered across agencies or other third parties.
We pride ourselves on getting to know you and the food you work so hard to get and keep on consumers’ shopping lists. That way, we can jump in on any project, have an existing understanding of your goals, and, with your OK, get right to getting — and measuring — results.