Managing The Commercial Communications Process (Week 18)
With the proliferation of digital channels, marketing is
undergoing a tremendous evolution. As a result, marketers at progressive
organizations are redirecting their efforts and concentrating on a more
holistic understanding of marketing performance.
In order to
drive response and determine the appropriate marketing mix in this new
paradigm, marketers must adopt a fresh approach to understand how to influence
prospects and customers. By doing so, marketers can maximize marketing spend
and generate stronger return on investment.
Five core
strategies are needed to measure marketing effectiveness. This is outlined
below as well as some key implementation tactics and ways to overcome the
most-common challenges marketers face during execution.
Plan ahead and design a
response-attribution infrastructure to support all channels
Many
organisations treat marketing measurement as an afterthought of campaign
planning. However, measurement and reporting are critical items on the
campaign-planning agenda. Up-front planning ensures the appropriate tracking
and testing conditions. Different channels require different tracking
mechanisms, but there are some common questions that should be addressed:
- What types of campaigns (acquisition, conversion cross-sell, etc.) will be tracked?
- How do cross-channel communications and campaigns roll up into a single program?
- What information is available to match a response, and should response metadata be enhanced?
- How will metadata be managed for direct-marketing and indirect-marketing campaigns?
When a
marketing program uses multiple channels, the campaign hierarchy must account
for each channel along with the appropriate rollups so that measurement aligns
with business goals. Each level within the hierarchy should be well defined and
understood by stakeholders prior to campaign implementation. Defining those
structures after the launch of the campaign, even if possible to do, greatly
increases the effort and frequently equates to inconclusive outcomes.
Create control groups for a more-accurate measurement of campaign
lift
With the
growth of digital media, it is even more important to adequately define
control-group criteria across all channels during the planning process. Doing
so ensures mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive segments that will
result in accurate accounting of the incremental results.
A lack of a centralized planning process frequently
hinders a marketer's ability to design and execute cross-channel campaigns
without polluting control groups, preventing accurate attribution, and biasing
measurement analyses. Defined control groups help to accurately measure true
campaign-lift metrics. Organizations that have marketing-planning and
campaign-management tools are able to create and manage control groups much
more effectively.
Define relevant measurement
metrics
Organizations
must define relevant metrics and measurement criteria, taking care to
systematically craft a metrics framework aligned with corporate strategy and
provide meaningful data to key stakeholders. The metrics must correlate the
marketing activities (cause) with the marketing performance, financial results,
and customer impact (effect).
A
successful metrics framework is used to understand the correlation of marketing
campaigns to defined corporate goals and objectives; moreover, it is not
limited to just basic response measurement but extends to true financial
results and customer-value metrics.
Define specific attribution rules by campaign
Attribution
rules are a function of a campaign's goals, the response channels, and the
outbound communications. Among the strategies for developing attribution rules
are the following:
- Designing and capturing rules for all channels in a campaign or program
- Understanding that tracking customer response may require some trial and error
- Focusing on more-generalized rules, devoting less attention to rules designed to manage a small percentage of responses
- Testing and validating rules for each campaign because different campaigns may behave differently
- Applying a waterfall approach for matching responses so that more-accurate rules can be assigned a higher priority
For digital
media, defining appropriate attribution tactics that cover the complete
spectrum of responses is vital. Different attribution tactics can be applied,
because multiple campaigns could be responsible cumulatively for the response:
First Impression: The
first campaign gets the credit for the response.
Last Impression: The
last campaign gets the credit for the response.
Equal Distribution: All
contributing campaigns get equal credit.
Weighted Distribution: The
credit is divided among different campaigns on the basis of a weighted
distribution.
Automate and use visual reporting and analytic tools
Organizations
can use many tools to automate portions of the tracking and reporting process.
Those tools can be configured to regularly track selected metrics on a periodic
basis and produce reports or graphs, which can be consumed by small or large
audiences.
Typically,
response processes capture disparate data elements, apply attribution rules,
and measure results to determine significant findings. Those steps present a
challenge to most organizations because of the sheer volume of information
represented across all campaigns, channels, and segments. Accordingly,
automation is the only means to achieve the necessary scale.
* * *
Implementing
the above-noted essential strategies will allow marketers to gain significant
insight into the performance and effectiveness of the different channels and
interaction effect among those channels. It will also help guide decisions in
marketing spend and investment across the channels.
Source (no copyright infringements
intended):
No comments:
Post a Comment