Welcome to module five of this Influencer Marketing Strategy course. This is actually my favorite part because in this module, we're going to focus on measurement. Now, measurement can make you or break you. Frankly, measurement can get you your next budget, your next promotion. And it's amazing how many marketers think of, yeah, that's the stuff I do at the end. Well, if you do it correctly, it can actually shape your strategy. So, in this module, we're going to cover a number of different things you should be measuring or you could be measuring, and you're going to need to differentiate what you measure when. So, the first thing we're going to take a look at is something that has puzzled me for years. In fact, I'm going to share some stories with you that go back as far as my father's era. And in the learning objective for this particular lesson, we're going to compare a couple of things. One is called Gross Rating Points, GRPs. Now, if you're not in advertising, you might not have stumbled over this term yet. But if you are in advertising, you will hear it. Another term that we'll talk about is Advertising Value Equivalency, AVEs. Now, if you've been in public relations, you may have heard of this term. If you're not, you may not have stumbled over it. But last but not least, we're going to talk about brand awareness, and frankly, something better than brand awareness, it's called brand lift. This is what you need to know about. Why? Because too many organizations still are justifying their influence, or marketing, or their influence on relationship, building efforts by saying, "It's going to build brand awareness." Yeah, right. That's the reason we're doing this. Really? So, riddle me this, if brand awareness is the reason you're doing something, and that's okay, I'm not saying it shouldn't be, I'm just saying if that's what you're using to justify all the effort that you're going to put in here, what was your brand awareness before you started? What is your brand awareness after your campaign? How much did you move the needle? Did brand awareness go up? You don't know that? Okay, so let's make some weird estimates. Why? We had impressions, lots of impressions. And oppressions must have helped brand awareness, right? Wrong. And I'm going to explain why. So, first of all, you're going to have to unlearn some of the things that you've learned. That's okay. That's part of this process. And then we're going to get to the things that you can measure and should measure. Ready? Let's go. So, here's my key takeaway. If brand awareness is your goal, then measure it. And I don't mean estimate it. This is not how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. This is not like, I got boatloads of impressions, and that must have improved brand awareness. That's the assumption, really? You know that. Well, did it go up 17 percent? I mean, seriously, that's the kind of thing you need to measure. So, here's the sad truth. There's been some research done by the content marketing institute. They do it every year. And one of the questions they ask is by the way, what are your organizational goals for your content marketing program? Now, I know this doesn't influence our marketing course but it's the best data that we have that's sort of analogous. Besides, we've already talked about how important content is to influencer marketing. And it turns out somewhere like 79 percent of B2B marketers, and 74 percent of B2C marketers say, "Yeah, brand awareness, that's why I'm doing content marketing, right." Okay. Bluffing isn't going to pay the rent, because here's the reality, only 15 percent of B2B marketers are measuring brand lift and frankly, only 21 percent of B2C marketers are measuring brand lift. Now what is brand lift? Well, here's my brand awareness before the campaign, here's the campaign, here's the brand lift afterwards. So, if this is important to you, if that's your objective, measure it. Now, 20 somewhat percent of marketers are, good for them. And we're going to share some best practices that you can be one of them too. But three times more marketers are bluffing. They're faking it. They are assuming that their brand awareness went up, bogus. And I want to call it out now, and I want to call it out here, because I don't want you to fall into that trap. I'm going to share with you a story to sort of drive all of this home. It's a painful story by the way. It is a story that involves my father. My father was a director of marketing at Oldsmobile. Now, some of you are too young to remember what an Oldsmobile is or was, it was a brand of car. In fact, it was one of the oldest brands of cars ever sold. It had been around for over 100 years before they closed it down in 2004. And my father was a director of marketing there and sort of the twilight years, which is not a happy time. But one of the things that he did in the late 1980s, I know before some of you were born, but bear with me this is a painful story, I'm going to share it with you. As he launched what was then an award winning ad campaign that declared loudly and proudly, this is not your father's Oldsmobile. Now, you can realize how I felt about this because it was my father's Oldsmobile. But I love my father, great guy, campaign was winning awards, there was just one problem, sales went down. And his agency Leo Burnett, said don't worry, this awareness thing takes time to ripple through the market, stick with the campaign. So he did. Why? Because the agency has been around for 100 years too and so they must know what they were doing. And the sales went down again. And by the third year in a row when sales went down yet again and frankly, the campaign had been running three years and sales have fallen and fallen and fallen until frankly, they were selling half as many cars as they had before the campaign began on an annual basis. My father called the agency in and said, "Excuse me, how are we measuring success?" And their answer was GRPs, gross rating points. And so he had to ask them this embarrassing question, "Well, how many GRPs do we need to sell a car?
