Step 5 - The Marketing Statement: Let’s Take A Look at Tukaluk
Let’s Backup a Bit
This is the ninth article in this series. The focus of the series is on how to create a marketing statement and why this is so important for marketers.
So far we have covered the first four steps from the book that Joanne and I wrote. Joanne O’Connell is my co-author. You can scroll to the end of this article to find a list of the articles in the series.
In this article, we are going to look at the final step of Phase 2 - Building the Model. At the end of Phase 2, you should have collected all the measures and calculated the metrics that you need. The calculations will include the conversion ratios between each level and the cost per level. Now you are ready to bring this all together into, what we call, a marketing statement.
A marketing statement “full picture of what is happening in marketing” (p 66).
It is a high-level summary, of what has happened in marketing over a specific period of time. Think of the marketing statement as filling a role similar to a financial income statement but focusing only on numbers related to marketing. It is a comprehensive view of what is happening at all levels of the model.
The Components
To create a marketing statement you will need the seven measures outlined in a previous article.
In addition, you will need to calculate the 10 metrics that are the basis of the marketing statement.
This will give you a total of 17 important numbers for the marketing statement.
Presentation Format
When I first started to create marketing statements I used Excel. This eventually morphed into using Google Sheets. Currently, we are using Looker Studio by Google. Looker Studio is free. It is relatively easy to use, however, there is a learning curve.
Marketing Statement for Tukaluk Campground and Cabins
If you have been following this series, we have been using marketing data from https://www.tukaluk.ca/. The owner, David Cooper, has given us permission to publish data from his company and the associated website. Thanks, David.
In this article, I’ll include screenshots of pages from Looker Studio using marketing data from Tukaluk Campground and Cabins.
This is the first page from Looker Studio. It gives a quick summary of what happened in the last month - that is the month before the current date.
On the page, we can see the measures on the left side for each level of the model. There are only 4 levels. The missing level from our generic model is Prospects. We are not collecting measures related to Prospects. Our assumption is that in the case of a campground and cabins, there are only visits (people visiting the website), offers (people who are interested and measured by those visiting specific pages on the website), and sales (people who pay and become customers).
On the right side of the page, we have calculated the key metrics. These are the conversion rates between each of the levels of the model. In this case, we have the visit rate, the offer rate and the sales rate.
We have not calculated the marketing cost per each level of the model. The main reason is that not much has been invested in marketing over the last two years. This might change next year.
Sales Nights are not the best measure. This is the sum of all the reservations in a month. This is why the sales rate is over 100%. A better measure would be the number of people who made a purchase regardless of the number of nights they stayed. We will improve our tracking process next year. For now, this is good information.
The next page in Looker Studio is related to impressions. The idea is to give a graph to show the volume of impressions on the various marketing channels used.
Impressions for Google Ads would be related to search ads as placed on Google search websites. David ran a strong campaign in 2023 but not in 2024. That is why nothing is showing up.
Impressions for Organic Search are the sum of all times that a webpage was visible in the search results after someone did a search. This data comes from Google Search Console. This number is a good measure of how many searches are done related to your company and the products offered.
Impressions for Meta Organic are related to posts on Facebook and Instagram. This data is only available for a few months previously. We are tracking only organic posts because we did not run any ads on Meta. Maybe next year we will.
The main focus of this page is to show the number of times people visited the website. In Google Analytics, we use the measure for “Users” since this reflects the number of people.
In addition to visits, we have included measures for bounce rate and engagement.
As you can see, we have measures for:
Last Year
Previous Month
Last Month, and
This Month
Observation: Visits last year were very high. This was due to the investment in Google Search Ads. Since June the volume of visits to the website has been decreasing. This is a seasonal trend.
For offers, we want to know how many people visited the two pages on the website where they can find out about the fees charged per night.
These pages are:
As you can see, we have measures for:
Last Year
Previous Month
Last Month, and
This Month
Observation: Visits to these pages were high in July and decreasing since then. This is a seasonal trend.
In the case of Tukaluk, we are using nights sold for “sales”. This is because this measure is available. Ideally, I would like the number of people who made a purchase, regardless of the number of nights. But this was not available, so we are using nights sold instead.
Observation: It is pretty easy to see that 2024 was a very successful year when compared to 2023.
What Isn’t Included
In this marketing statement, we have not included:
Investments in marketing (what was spent on marketing and advertising)
Revenues generated (this information is confidential)
As a result, we are not able to calculate metrics for:
Marketing cost for each level in the model
Revenue per sale
Summary
Looker Studio is an excellent platform to present a marketing statement and show key measures and critical metrics related to marketing. The marketing statement gives a quick overview of what is happening over the last few months and compare that to what happened last year for the same time period (assuming the measures are available).
Past Articles
In our first article, Step 1: Asking Important Questions, we laid the groundwork for understanding key questions before starting this project. This article followed our previous series, "10 Things I Learned from Joanne," which began with Each Level of the Model Must be Measurable.
In the second article, Step 2: Design the Model, we took a look (pun intended) at designing the customer acquisition model. This step is critical for defining the levels of the model and the marketing channels. The financial aspects of the model are implied, but not listed explicitly. We will get to this later.
In the third article, Step 3: Collect the Measures - Visits, we looked at how to find and collect the measures to add to the model.
In the fourth article, Step 4: Calculate the Metrics, we looked at the task of using 2 measures to calculate a ratio. In general terms, as defined in our book, all calculations using measures are called metrics.
In the fifth article, Chipping Away at Revenues, we calculated the absolute maximum revenue ($796,795) that was possible and then identified various external forces that whittle away at this optimistic number. Eventually, we arrived at the realistic maximum ($234,623) which is significantly less. The rest of the article focused on options for achieving this level of revenue. For this year, we decided that social media marketing was the best tactic.
In the sixth article, The Intensiveness of Marketing is a Choice, we looked at a 2X2 that Joanne and I developed. The matrix compared % of Reach for the Selected Market on the y-axis and the Intensiveness of Marketing on the x-axis. I answered a series of questions on behalf of David Cooper, the owner, and concluded that the strategy moving forward is to focus marketing on a few reliable channels (low % of reach and low intensiveness).
In the seventh article, Awesome Tenting Campsite, I briefly described staying at Tukaluk Campground during a trip I took to BC.
In the eighth article, The Importance of Impressions, we looked at reasons why Joanne and I measure and tracked impressions. In a nutshell, marketing buys impressions. Creating and managing impressions is fundamental to managing marketing. There is no marketing if there are no impressions. Because impressions are important, it is important to keep an eye on where the impressions are occurring and, to some extent, the volume of impressions created.