How Are Your Ratings?

By Scott Gerschwer, OutputLinks

Sometimes the old stuff works best. Take marketing measurement. Ask an old TV executive how a new TV show is doing and all you will hear about are ratings.

Ask a marketer how a certain campaign is going and they will talk about everything from hits, clicks, open rates, response rates, bounce rates, click-thru rate, ROI, NPV, cost per lead, send-to-friend and a whole slew of other terms. It gets complicated.

Ratings? They don’t talk about ratings.

But here’s the truth about marketing and the Internet: People hate to click on ads. Don’t you? You know there is someone on the other end gathering up information about you. Why give it away?

Why give that information away by clicking through when you can simply type the name into Google or the browser and get everything you need without looking like a prospect. That’s why they call it a browser—you’re just browsing. When you say that to a sales girl at the mall she leaves you alone, right? And that’s what we all want—to be left alone. To seek out information on our own terms.

Marketers who advertise on TV don’t measure click-thru rates. They get the show ratings and from there they know that their ad—and their brand, their product, their service—is being seen by X amount of people that watch the show. They understand us channel surfers and those DVRers, and they account for a rate of attrition. The point is, they base their ad spend on those ratings because they know that there is a cumulative effect over time that they can use to build their brand, sell their product and gain customers.

It’s worked for them for 50 years.

And, sure, there are tactical applications of advertising: McDonalds understands that a well-placed commercial to launch a new burger an hour before lunch gets X amount of people to go purchase that burger. But for the most part they are taking a tidal approach. Their ads wash over us and erode our resistance like the tide gently washes away a beach.

I look at my ratings for this column. I know how many people get this email blast and how many people are likely reading this sentence. I know because it is measured. And I work hard to get my ratings up.

So here’s the question for marketers: How are your ratings?

You know you can use the bill to get your message across. You know how many people get the bill each month. You know that you can send that message to the same group three months in a row and it will build in impact.

Your transpromo mail piece could lead someone to search for you online. 

And any number of action mechanisms can aid your measurement: QR codes, purls, tiny urls, active searches, etc.

The number of households getting your message is a good metric. In TV they call it ratings.

TV advertisers stick with Nielson ratings because they still work. The old-fashioned values of hard work, persistence and creativity still apply. It can work for you in print.

So adopt transpromo and play the ratings game. And you will see that the old ways still work best.  

Want to help your career? Want to help your company become more competitive? If your executives don’t read OutputLinks, send them a link to this article. It will give them something to think about. And they will be grateful that you thought of them.

Competitive organizations read OutputLinks to learn more about optimizing the two most important assets they have: customers and cash flow.