Tips Kitchen Table Recap: Trends and tips for watching COVID-19 recovery milestones.

In last weeks Inntopia Family Kitchen Table conversation, I kicked off the call with a dive into what numbers we are all watching to know how and when to ramp up our marketing. It’s a tough place to be in. Nobody wants to insensitive or say the wrong thing during a tricky time, but we’ve gotta get some revenue in the door ASAP.

So we kicked off the call with three marketers – Jon Slaughter, Sugar Bowl; Andrew Weimar, Red Lodge Mountain; and Reed Weimer, Red River – who shared what they were watching for. And then we posed it to the group with this poll question:

Which metrics are you monitoring to guide decisions regarding the restart of marketing activity?

The responses from the group were very similar to Jon, Andrew, and Reed’s perspective.

One of the key takeaways, that I want to reiterate here, is that almost nobody is watching just one number. They’re all looking for multiple indicators of a more appropriate time to ramp up various messages or products.

This is awesome, but there are a few things I mentioned then that I want to reiterate now about watching data.

Watching Multiple Data Sets

Let me clarify that the point of watching multiple trends is NOT to have a greater chance of finding one that gives you the green light. Instead, it’s a great way to ensure that you don’t do anything too knee-jerk. If one data set says something? Meh. If two or three do? Now we’re talkin.

Zoom Out

The next thing to remember is that you shouldn’t make decisions based on daily data. Thursday could be way up, Friday could be way down, but week-to-week will show a much more accurate, useful trend. Someone I follow on Twitter runs a boutique analytics agency, and put it in the context of mental health, but it’s just as true for marketing decisions.

i implore you to stop looking at daily data, it's not good for your mental health. you simply do not know enough about the data to be making extreme conclusions from it.

if you must look, please limit yourself to percent changed from previous day trended over WEEKS not days.

— jason (@usujason) March 23, 2020

Personally, I’ve set aside Monday morning for making sense of everything I’ve seen and making any strategic decisions for the week.

Your Customers, Your Marketing

But the most telling metric of all will be your own audience, your own marketing, your own conversations with your customers. Which means, you’ve gotta start pushing stuff out sooner or later. It doesn’t have to be promotional, but just having some engagement metrics to keep an eye on along with all the macro stuff can be a great ally as you feel your way through this situation.

That said, be okay with making mistakes. I’ve already made a few, I’ll surely make more. Perfection isn’t possible when nobody knows the rules. Keep trying, keep moving, and go easy on yourself if things don’t work the first time.