The Danger of Overanalyzing Marketing Data in the Suit Industry

Let's dive into something crucial for suit business owners – the danger of overanalyzing your marketing data. Trust me, I get it. You want control over your business, including your marketing performance. But here's why that might be a bad idea.

Misleading Indicators

How do you evaluate if your ads are performing well? Most owners look at the cost per click (CPC). They think:

"Cheaper clicks mean better performance, right?"

Wrong.

If your agency can’t deliver cheaper CPCs, they’re often seen as ineffective. On the surface, it makes sense, but it’s a flawed approach.

The Auction Game

Every time your ad has a chance to be shown, it enters an auction. The highest bidder wins, but it’s not that simple. Thousands of parameters are considered – the viewer’s location, income, hobbies, job position, online behavior, and urgency to buy.

So, higher bids often correlate with a higher probability of conversion.

Does that mean you will sell to 100% of your visitors if you are the highest bidder? No. It just means the highest likelihood.

This doesn't mean you should run and spend the most you can per click, as it is always more nuanced and could be an area for a whole workshop.

The point here is that by trying to evaluate the performance on decreasing cost per click, you force the agency or employee to fit the preconceived mold of the owner.

This leads to the situation that looks like this:

Lower CPC often means a lower-quality audience, leading to worse performance. And then you think, “We need cheaper clicks.” Rinse and repeat until failure.

Quick Example:

Client A: A bespoke suit business in Dubai spent thousands focusing on cheap clicks. They ended up with placements in mobile games where people clicked only to get in-game perks – not the audience or the intent they were looking for.

Social Media Missteps

When it comes to social media, popular indicators like engagement, comments, follower count, and video views can also mislead you.

Obsess over these, and you’re doomed. Here’s why: you get what you pay for.

These goals are cheaper than clicks or purchases because they have lower intent. You’ll attract people who like, comment, or watch out of habit, not intent. Million likes don’t mean more money.

Quick Example:

Client B: An RTW suit business in the UK wanted wide coverage. Burdening the ad platform with the goal of the cheapest views, it was forced to view their ad as an unskippable video only, forcing everyone to watch their ad. They got a 100% view rate which was “amazing”, but after spending thousands, no increase in clients, and the local newspaper featured their ad as an example of annoying marketing, which most likely decreased the perceived value of their brand.

Quick solution

Focus on quality, not quantity. Measure things closer to the purchase – cost per filled form, purchase, call, etc.

Even Measuring the Right Data Isn’t Always Right

Sadly, in the suit industry, the standard approach doesn’t work well because of something called "the attribution window".

Imagine someone planning a wedding. They do their homework, save links, and visit in a few months.

The spreadsheet with data for a month would indicate that the ad was bad and you should give up or hop to the next agency promising miracles.

In reality, the results would start showing in a few months, when a new service provider would get the shot and get a good start taking credit for the past work.

The issue is that their performance would be evaluated in the same flawed way as before in the next months, so the next service provider is already on the way.

Conversion Complexity

Someone sees your ad, clicks then visits your store or shares the link to a friend who becomes a client. These conversions aren’t tracked. If your ad performance review spreadsheet shows one sale but reality shows ten, you might give up on ads or switch providers again, missing out on hidden successes attributing those to referrals or "your brand".

The Real Solution

Measure overall ROMI and YoY growth, adjusted for organic growth, seasonality, and inflation. But remember, you can’t account for everything. Was it a sunny day and no one was on their phones? A major sports event gluing folks to the screens for a few days? An aggressive campaign by Temu making all advertising more expensive for a while? The economy took a hit?

You can’t adjust for all variables.

Final Solution

After years of trying to force the classic approach to work, we learned that analyzing spreadsheets helps to compare relative performance, run tests, and squeeze efficiency if there’s enough traffic. But 99% of the time, that’s not the case as buying enough traffic for trustworthy statistical significance would make you go bankrupt.

Data won’t sell suits – your branding will.

Develop a Vision

Develop a vision of what you want your market to think about you.

The most effective ones that we have seen and implemented:

“Become the most trusted and well-known person on the topic of suits”

“Become synonymous with everything related to suits and sartorial lifestyle”

Make a strategy on how to show that. (content/text on website/style of communication)

Distribute that with advertising channels and evaluate the performance of distribution.

With previously mentioned issues you can see that selling a suit like a commodity is an uphill battle, so instead your marketing should shift to generating real and engaged fans.

Instead of a trader, try to see yourself as Leonardo Di Caprio in the movie Inception, planting thoughts into your audience's minds, which later convert them into buyers.

Have a budget you’re comfortable with for multiple months. Make a strategy, execute, and analyze overall ROMI and YoY performance.

Invitation

If you need some assistance with this endeavor from folks who have done it in their own suit business scaling it over 15 times in profits and helping many other suit businesses in the last 7 years, shoot us a message in my DM's on LinkedIn or schedule a free consultation if such is available at the time here: https://calendly.com/sartorialdigital/45min

To your success,

Andris