The Water Industry's Quest For The Holy Grail Of Marketing

Do you know what the “holy grail” of marketing performance is? The metaphorical chalice that would provide eternal happiness, youth and infinite profits for all business. Having been involved in digital marketing for twenty years now, I’ve seen a lot of marketers try unsuccessfully to find it.

And despite the plethora of marketing automation software and analytical vendors now available, it still has yet to be discovered. What remains unearthed and hidden from view is our collective ability to directly link sales to advertising effort or spend.

The closest example I’ve ever seen to this being achieved is with a weight loss and dietary food plan company. Beyond their food products, this company is first and foremost a marketing services company. Its sales and marketing efforts are so data-driven, analyzed and coordinated that they can measure the effect of each individual advertisement on sales. They actually tinker with an ad, rerun it, gauge the difference in the sales calls it generates and adjust again.  

But here’s the thing. The company is an order-taking business. Marketing drives the buyer to pick up the telephone or fill out an online form and puts them directly in touch with the sales person to take their order. That doesn’t happen in the water and wastewater industry. If it did, you wouldn’t need to pay your rep firms nearly as much money to sell your products. 

Many companies are trying to get better analytics on their marketing performance. Although the adoption of marketing automation software in the water industry has been slow in comparison to the online shopping or mobile computing space, it is beginning to be used by progressive companies and it has many benefits. Perhaps chief among them is the ability (with all other parameters held equal) to show you what types of content are performing best for your company at engaging readers. Other advantages include the ability to feed additional pieces of follow-up content to a reader and nurture their relationship with your company prior to a salesperson formally engaging.

From a brand publishing perspective, good analytics on your marketing content’s performance can help you understand how to position your company as a thought leader. By producing a variety of content, some of it very product or application specific and other pieces more over-arching or industry-at-large in nature, you can experiment to land on the right content angles to successfully define your Company moving forward.

However, I’m skeptical that any amount of data analysis and marketing automation will ever succeed in directly linking the sale of most products used in water and wastewater treatment back to specific advertisements or content. Just think about how purchasing at your own company works. You may read about a device or tool that could help your department operate more efficiently but how often do you have the lone-authority to buy that product without getting others involved in the procurement process.

Purchasing is messy. Especially in our industry. Despite the promises that the software of today can provide the missing link between marketing spend and sales, I think we’re still a long way off. And yet measuring the traditional marketing goals of brand awareness, content views and thought-leadership share has never been easier or more worthwhile.