ROA: On KPI to Rule Them All

Return on Attention - Todays Most Powerful & Least Understood Marketing Metric

By @ReidGenauer | Chief Marketing Officer @Magisto

We’re living through a singular event in the history of humankind, as profound as the birth of written language. A massive upheaval of communication, culture, and commerce driven by the hyper accelerated pace of technology and an ever thickening digital lens through which we perceive the world. Its an amplification of thought and communication thats transforming the very fabric of our reality. When you examine the impact on go-to market strategy and business communication the magnitude of disruption can seem almost beyond comprehension.

 The Go-To-Market Gap: There are in fact a plethora of marketing strategies and innovations designed to address the changes afoot. These innovations are accelerating to meet the curve of disruption. However as a community of professionals we are, at least for a period of time, facing a gap between “what is” culturally and our ability to capture the hearts and minds of a new customer psychology. While the solutions are still evolving the challenges we face as business leaders are fairly well understood. The greatest of which is that the medium, the message and mechanics of human narrative has been forever changed. 

The Core Challenge For Business: The center of gravity for any communication, including business narrative has moved from from top down monolithic broadcasting, to high velocity bottoms up social storytelling. Narrative is now controlled by the individual. The first step in addressing this conundrum is admitting that there is one. As business people we have to accept that the customer journey is no longer linear, that the individual is driving the ship. The ways in which we go-to-market have to align with this power shift. I’ve heard and have myself described the new customer journey as a matrix, but even that strikes me as a tad generous. The truth is, that no two customer journeys are alike.

The Birth of Return on Attention (ROA :

Return on Attention is an underrepresented marketing metric that centers entirely around the most coveted currency for businesses today — attention. Below I’ve outlined a case for why Return On Attention (ROA) is so important and attempted to unpack some of the nuances of how it works.

The Fallacy of Legacy Marketing Metrics: It’s tempting to pine for the good old days. We created a narrative, handed it off to a creative agency, let smart media buyers tell us where to publish and the customer understood the social contract. They “had” to consume an advertisement to access forms of broadcast entertainment, and if the ad was any good they made a purchase. The upside to the days of yore is that TV advertising was one big red button. Insert $15M in media spend and press “go” and voila. The downside is well summarized in the old adage “we know 50% of our marketing is effective we just don't know which 50%”

A New Noise/Signal Ratio: Today people engage with each other and with products in staggeringly complex ways, multiple times a day, across multiple channels, and through multiple mediums. So naturally, understanding what drives engagement, loyalty, and purchases is also exponentially harder. It’s left brand marketers struggling to redefine “quality” of creative, achieve scale and measure effectiveness of a new form of narrative. Performance marketers are faced with similar questions about where storytelling fits into the marketing funnel and how best to measure its impact on conversion and life time value. Wether they know it or not both breads of marketers are in dire need for metrics that will help them make sense of the tangled web (pardon the pun), and a process around which they can build a repeatable go-to market strategy.

 Customers Competing with Companies for Share of Mind: For the first time in history customers are competing with companies for share of mind. As business leaders we’re no longer just competing with other businesses for attention but rather with every human being on the planet. In social media individuals now have found a bullhorn designed for self expression through media creation and distribution. To help illustrate the mechanics at play there are approximately 30 million businesses in the United States and 300 million individuals. That's 10x more individuals than business. An order of magnitude. As individuals in the social era we more or less have the same power to create and distribute media as business. Its not unreasonable to argue that a single individual actually has a louder share of voice than a single business because they are not encumbered by quality control and decision making and because their audience, read friends and family, actually want to hear what they have to say. 

Interpersonal Communication Supported by Broadcast Ads: To illustrate the point further social media is a form of interpersonal communication that has a broadcast model of advertising affixed to it. Imagine if companies started playing ads while you were having a conference call or on the phone with your mom. Not only would it be white noise it would be offensive. It’s flat out odd to be looking at pictures of ones friends and family and to see a Martech company trying to sell you a new tech stack. In short advertising as we once knew it doesn’t have the relative weight it once had vs individual communication, it doesn't have the right voice, cadence or context and as such faces a need for an overhaul and/or an ever dwindling audience

Return on Attention (ROA): A Two-Pronged Metric: So what do we do? How do we get out of this vicious cycle wherein consumers lob exabytes (that's an S.A.T word for TONS) of user generated media into the social-sphere each year and businesses scramble to keep up with the velocity and tenor of a hyper driven conversation? The answer is to find and generate a consistent connection, a “signal” by both winning attention and more importantly maintaining that attention with content that genuinely creates value for the viewer. To do that with consistency every company has to become an agile new media company. The formula is actually pretty simple

• Step 1: We need to win our customers attention with content that is not only compelling but valuable to them as an individual.
• Step 2: Repeat step 1 indefinitely across the users journey.

The Convergence of Brand and Performance Marketing

Whats fascinating about the notion on Return On Attention is that is offers a solution for branding and performance marketing. It points to a convergence in the spectrum of marketing functions and tactics that blends the emotional pull of brand marketing with the measurable results of performance marketing throughout the customer journey. 

• The Brand Marketer: The central goal of brand marketing has historically been to drive awareness. Sure we need to create relevance and consideration downstream but awareness has always been the leading KPI.
• The Performance Marketer: On the flip side the central goal of performance marketing has always been the click. Again we need to manage on-boarding, engagement and LTV but those are often seen at tomorrows problem, downstream from the click.  

How to Achieve ROA

Much of the discussion of ROA thus far has focused on it as an alternative to old notions of both brand and performance marketing — once we get someones attention, how do we convert that attention to a sale? But the real value of ROA is not a new widget for getting attention. Rather it represents it's a new repeatable go-to-market methodology that depends on maintaining that attention. It has the potential to transform entire product-market strategies. ROA isn’t just a metric for marketers, it's a metic for entire businesses and most importantly for customers as well. It's the lens by which each side sees the other, the new social contract.

Attention Is Valuable Currency: For business leaders, the key is understanding that we’ll be lucky to get even a microscopic share of our customers’ attention, and that means it has to count. We have to cherish that attention as currency and grow the value of that currency by investing in it. When a customer lends us their attention, we need to ensure that the content and the experience we’re delivering respects them first as person and secondly as a customer. It's a simple twist that earns your company trust. The only way you can ensure that you convert loaned attention into a recurring customer is if the person feels like they’re constantly getting something of value in return for their attention every time they engage with your business. 

The 4 Ps of The Attention Economy: here are broad steps to frame a strategy that supports ROA:

• Personification: Since social media is designed for individuals to socialize I try to think about how I can personify my companies messaging by using a conversational first person voice, showing myself and/or my colleagues and of course celebrating our customers.
• Passion: We start with content that celebrates the passion we share with our customers. In our case it's the power of video story. No matter what category of business you, by definition, share a passion with your customers. Often we don’t even mention our product or service at first. We just talk about the shared passion for visual narrative. After we’ve established our authentic passion we work at expressing our motive for building a business that supports that passion. We try to illustrate how the core values of that passion inform and motivate us .
•  Proof: From there we work to prove our passion and domain expertise by offering generic categorical case studies, or by celebrating our customers and partners in an authentic, “its not about us” ways. In our case we can teach people things like how to shoot video for business videos – regardless of wether they use Magisto to edit and market that content.
• Purchase: After we’ve established trust and a relationship based on providing consistent value to the people we interact with we ask them to activate that trust in the form of a purchase at which point we've converted a person to a customer and we have earned the right to extract value from that customer relationship. 

Closing Remarks

Like so many things in business Return on Attention is easier said than done. My suggestion would be to start by testing the media, messaging and measurement to prove out your own hypothesis on ROA.

In keeping with this dialogue I would also encourage you to explore scalable social video. Magisto is a Saas platform for video creation or Vaas - video as a service. Framing video communication as a platform rather than an static asset class is a powerful way to create content with emotional resonance, high velocity and strong unit economics. Please take part in the conversation by leaving me a comment or sharing other media you think is pertinent

I look forward to hearing from you and exploring the future with you. Thanks for lending me your attention.

@ReidGenauer

Chief Marketing Officer @Magisto

@rgenauer