Discussing The PROPEL Model In Marketing

‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail’ – Benjamin Franklin. The planning phase is responsible for setting the foundations of your strategy. It involves understanding your current presence online, your resources and who will be responsible.

During planning we focus on determining a number of key factors:

Purpose: What are we using digital to achieve or hope to achieve?
Success Outcomes: How will the success of your digital activity manifest for your business so that you can clearly identify progress?
Existing Channels: What already exists so that you don’t duplicate channels but also know what you have already?
Resources: What Time, Money and People do you have at your disposal?

Planning is crucial to gather as much information as possible and to set you up for success from the outset. The purpose of the planning phase is to establish the foundations of your strategy, its requirements, your current activity, expectations, resources and internal ownership. Planning gives you control early on but also creates flexibility in later stages because of how detailed your understanding of your strategy is.

Business performance is an important expectation because it is often misguided in solely looking at direct sales. Outside of just focusing on sales, it is important to understand success can also be measured in leads and engagement.

PROPEL MODEL IN MARKETING

Awareness: How aware of your product and service are users online? This can be measured by focus groups, site visits, search volumes, organic impressions, growth in engagement levels and mentions.
Sales: Only possible if you are able to track sales from digital to your site or if you can track the journey of a sale and how your digital activities played a role in influencing the sale. As a rule of thumb, if you can’t buy your product or service on your site then ask yourself how you expect to measure ROI?
Site Visits: How many of your customers are regularly visiting your site? Where are they coming from?
Leads: If you collect customer leads through forms, where are you creating traffic to your forms leads can result in sales.
Sentiment: Can you identify conversations online that are positive about your brand? This can be measured using social listening tools.
Engagement: How are your customers engaging with your brand across your online channels e.g. social.

The biggest challenge for digital is that there is so much that you can do. Being clear and concise is crucial. You have got to make use of all of your resources in an efficient manner. Know where your money is best spent and try to minimize wastage.

Customer engagement is often overlooked as a ‘hygiene factor’, when in fact it represents your brands perceived voice and tone. You have the potential to turn both into a part of your brand DNA on your site and on social media. Review these metrics to measure the effectiveness of your customer engagement:

Awareness: Is your customer service giving you the ability to create higher awareness levels?
Reduced Customer Service (CS) Costs: Is the use of social media allowing you to manage your CS expenditure?
Insight: Are your customers giving you an insight into your products and services from which you can make valuable improvements?
Sentiment: Is your CS quality adding value to the business by creating positive sentiment?
Reach: The total number of people you can reach with your activity.

Are you able to prove that the engagement you are experiencing offers value to the business? The following metrics can help to measure useful engagement:

Insight: Are your activities on digital giving you additional insight into what your customers want or how you can design your products and services?
Awareness: Is your activity showing an awareness of offers, products, services, etc.?
Sentiment: Can you identify positive sentiment in how your customers are engaging with you?

Comprehension: If you have complicated products or services – can you see that customers are identifying/searching for features and details that show an understanding of the product/service?
Site Visits: Is your activity resulting in creative traffic to your site?
Earned Media Value: Is your digital activity resulting in earned impressions on top of your paid delivery? This is found within your social channels.

The most important work is done in identifying early on what your expectations are from your campaign and what value digital will bring to it. However, after you execute your campaign, you can also look at the following metrics:

Awareness: Is your use of digital increasing your brand footprint?
Customer Engagement: For most businesses, regardless of size, the use of social media should be a long-term daily commitment but in addition to this there should be instances when you elevate specific moments throughout the year for new products, services, timings.

Sales: Can you track sales back to digital channels?
Leads: Have you generated leads from gated content or subscription forms on your digital channels?
Sentiment: Use observable social listening after campaign execution.
Site Visits: What digital channels are creating traffic to your site?

When looking to utilise a campaign, the most effective campaign work is that which maintains singular goals from the very start, e.g. sales, engagement, awareness, sentiment, etc. Ultimately, campaigns should be designed to achieve one over-arching business success outcome.

Thinking years ahead is not exciting, we all want to see results now! But it is very important to think long-term when identifying your digital strategy. In order to ensure we see results, we can introduce phasing. Break your strategy up into key phases and time periods. Each time period should have an identified success outcome.

Try not rush into success or be rushed into success by your superiors. It’s easy to force results in the short term, but this is not sustainable.

ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is the cost of your digital activities versus the return it generates.

Success within your digital activities is boiled down to two key outcomes:

1.Sales: Someone buying your product through a digital channel or as a result of digital activity.

2.Leads: Capturing valuable data from customers who express an interest in your product or service. This data is best captured through lead forms on landing pages on your site.

The most commonly referenced outcome of new digital channels is ‘engagement’. Yes, engagement can be an objective of your activity, but you should aim to understand how engagement is in turn impacting either sales or leads!

Return On Investment implies exactly that, a ‘return’. It doesn’t immediately imply revenue. What are the returns from digital that you know are important metrics that you attribute to business results? For example, video views imply awareness, positive conversation, search volumes, etc.

There is no secret formula to ROI. Anyone who tells you there is, is lying. ROI is built over time and through experience. You need to learn from your activities and closely monitor business metrics. What patterns can you identify? ROI is about building your own formula.

ROI can be a tricky subject because for so many, ROI is measured in monetary value ($, €, ¥, £, etc.). Your potential for success with digital will increase as soon as you get rid of this thinking. Yes, ROI can be a monetary value but also a specific action e.g. site visits, enquiries, video retention, video views.

You must first understand the relationship each digital activity has to the sale. Consider how each digital channel influences the actions that result in sales e.g. happy customers spend more money, can sentiment levels be tracked back to sales or at least consideration?

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