How to Measure Your Omni-Channel Marketing Strategy

Jeremy Schubert of Lunabean Media provided a great presentation on omnichannel marketing for wineries at the DTC Symposium.  He provided a recipe for success usable by any winery whether you need the whole menu or just want to take a portion to compliment what you're already doing.

It wasn't just tactics.  He provided a structure and a process to consistently get the results you want. I love the fact that he starts the process by identifying the business goal and works backwards.  This provides focus so you don't get caught with a hodgepodge of tactics. Also great that he provided the honest assessment that these are 12 to 18 month efforts. Don't expect instant fixes or short-term one to two months tactics to drive sustained improvement.

Listening to him speak with my analytics centric view. I started thinking about what analysis best compliments these strategies.  Because we start with goals, and goals change over time, we need tailored reports, dashboards, and monitoring created specifically for the strategy.  In addition, we should benchmark each of the key leading indicators and set measurable results for our goals.  These efforts combine to tell us our starting position and whether we progress along our path towards success.  These initial pieces also flag when parts of the plan underperform so we can dig in and get back on track.

What to watch and how to watch progress is where things get interesting from a metrics and analysis perspective.  Omni channel marketing generates a large amount of data. Honestly, it's probably too much data to track manually or for a person to digest across visualizations. Let me give a concrete example to illustrate why I say this. If you look at a single Google Ads campaign, you need to measure more than just the ad performance (views, clicks, click thru rate, cost per click.) You also want to watch impact on SEO and impact on web traffic, so now you're tracking three channels.  For SEO you want to track your general ranking but also the targeted keywords that you're using in your ad campaigns to see if you're getting organic improvements for your search results.  For web analytics,  you want to track the usual metrics (new/repeat visitors, session length, page visits, page paths, funnel conversions, etc) but multiplied by paid and organic behavior to measure audience growth and quality of visitors.  In addition, you want to track the quality (page views, session length, etc) for visitors driven to the site via the Google Ads as well as various search terms.  As you can see, even this partial list  has already grown to well over 20 metrics across 3 channels, and that is for just one ad campaign.  Odds are you have more than one active campaign, multiplying the metrics again, and we haven’t even dug deep enough into the general web metrics, email, social platforms, and so on.

So how can you stay on top of the performance of this 12 to 18 month effort?  How can you identify where you should celebrate and where to change/refine tactics to lift performance?  I’d recommend establishing benchmarks for the key metrics and then monitoring for significant changes at the channel level.  Your campaigns are a tactic to drive longer term improvements across your channels (search, social, email, etc.)  But how can you do that for things like clicks, page visitors, or session length?  Those numbers bounce around week to week.  You do it by establishing a performance level based on a sample of data and then use statistical analysis to identify the performance level.  Doing this also lets you know the expected amount of variation so you can easily tell when you have moments of significant ups or downs (aka outliers) that deserve your attention.  Finally, you need to continue to monitor samples of that metric so you can see when the overall performance has actually improved in a sustained way that basically sets a new overall performance level for the metric.

Unless  your winery has an internal analytics/BI team, you won’t have the time or technology to take on this work.  However, if  you don’t find a way to track it you really are just going through the motions with your marketing, unclear of the impact and not learning the key lessons to improve next time.  Find a partner who can provide this holistic view of your marketing efforts to make sure you get the expected ROI and can start down a path of continuous improvement.  Your business will become more stable and you’ll get better and better results over time.

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