AMEC MM 2019 BLOG – Rick Guttridge, Co-Owner and Managing Director Smoking Gun

We are a (global) nation of professional persuaders.

Maybe PR = Public Relations = Persuasive Reasoning, after all that’s how we help our clients formulate and transmit their messages in order to make their target audiences ‘think feel and do’ differently.

So, as experts in persuasion, why do agencies often face and lose battles to persuade new clients to invest in measurement and evaluation?

Why does too much measurement still stop at fluffy measures?

We’ve all too often heard the popular refrains espoused by clients:

“You need to show your ROI – we insist you show us AVE scores so we can compare you to our last agency.”

“Measurement should come out of your fee.”

“Just show us the media coverage.”

“It’s up to you to prove your value.”

“You need to tell us what we should measure, we don’t know.”

A study by the University of Leicester found that “the single significant behavioural difference between persuaders and persuadees was in the expression of confidence.”

Sometimes as a profession we lack the confidence to push back, stand our ground or accurately articulate how and why they should measure. Perhaps it’s the perennial fear of looking over our shoulders thinking someone else will win the work just by agreeing to use AVEs etc?

Negotiation around this topic should simply start with logic.

• Ask how they measure and evaluate other key functions in their business e.g. customer service, staff engagement
• Dig deeply into measurement of other marketing disciplines
• Understand their dashboard (real or imagined) of key organisation measures
• Who measures them, how do they measure, do they have costs attached or ‘just’ human time and resource?
• Match your reporting to their rhythm, style and language

You will gain a much clearer sense of how much of a data led organisation they are in terms of process and decision making. This will help determine how fast and hard you can push for comms measurement – remember it’s a journey, they don’t need to do everything at once!

This also helps to identify what measures and tracking are in place for other marketing services that you can jump on, utilise and work with for your reporting.

To take the discussion forward, make it clear why it’s beneficial to the client to measure – for them personally to look good (never underestimate the power of WIIFM – what’s in it for me- when clients are decision making) AND for the business overall.

There is no hard and fast rule of how much time and effort to spend on measurement and evaluation but a common sense approach would be around 10% of total spend. Collecting the data is often actually the easy bit once you start looking, it’s the human time to evaluate, analyse, make sense and provide insight and real findings, not just pages of stats, that is key.

As an agency you have to make the commercial call on whether this is baked into your fees or transparently flagged as additional or separate costs.

To sum up, start small, be confident in your reasoning and use logic to win the discussion not force. Be polite, be patient but be persistent. It’s worth it for both parties.

Stay up to date and join the discussions this Measurement month right here on this blog or by following these # on social:#AMECagencies and #AMECmm.