By Unifying your Marketing Model
Chief Marketing Officers around the world have the same problem: control and allocate their marketing budget. Especially during challenging times, CMOs have to make tough decisions. Should you cut staff, tech stack, or media spend? Is it useful to cut advertising budgets, and will this have a detrimental effect on sales? These are some of the hundreds of questions CMOs have to answer. While companies are expecting to achieve more with less, CMOs are in the difficult position of having to make strong decisions that will have the biggest impact on the revenue of the business.
This challenge requires Marketing Chief Officers to have a clear understanding of how budget allocation is distributed and influences sales. However, for large corporations – where marketing activities are endless – it is hard to monitor and have a clear overview of the effectiveness of each campaign.
At Objective Platform, we believe that our Unified Marketing Measurement Framework can solve these problems around marketing budget. Our sophisticated models help you analyse, track, monitor, and predict the performance of all marketing activities – both online and offline. In the following article, we gathered the top 5 challenges CMOs are experiencing in their budget allocation, and we discuss how to tackle them by using our approach.
1. Prove the business impact of marketing activities
Demonstrating that your marketing spending contributes to business success can be sometimes challenging. Impressions, clicks, and reach are not enough proof to convince the CEO, CFO, or any other decision-maker that your strategy has an impact on revenue, ROI, shareholder value, and brand equity.
Our platform aims at providing you with all this evidence. Firstly, we create a single source of truth where all activities (both online and offline), as well as their results, are gathered in one place. In our dashboards, you get independent insights on the performance of all your activities where you can see (for example):
In this way, CMOs can speak the language of business and provide concrete insights on the impact of each campaign and marketing effort on the short and long-term goals of the company.
2. Optimise marketing activities across all touchpoints
As you probably already know, consumers rarely go from the awareness to purchase stage. There is a more complicated and complex journey that is spread across both online and offline channels, and CMOs need to understand what are the key channels that convince users to convert. Therefore, a more holistic overview is needed. For example, our unified measurement shows that a multichannel retailer drove a significant increase in revenue by beginning its awareness TV advertising two weeks before it released its sales-focused online ads. And according to Forrester, a unified approach to marketing activities can improve the efficiency of marketing budgets by 15% to 20%.
Furthermore, in our Unified Marketing Model, you can also compare and contrast the effectiveness of channels. For instance, you can measure the effectiveness of Facebook vs Instagram or even TV vs Paid Search Ads. With the use of our optimisation tool, you can create a business plan based on forecasts and ensure that your budget allocation is targeted towards the right channels in the user journey.
Lastly, when it comes to budget cuts, you can make sure that your decisions are data-driven and all possible factors that influence a campaign are included. What we mean is that in our model, we include external factors (e.g. seasonality, pricing) that might have an impact on your results. As a consequence, you can ensure that you have salutary insights to decide what’s not working, where you have to improve, and where you should focus more in future campaigns.
“The fact that we can look at our performance across the funnel and different touchpoints enables us to optimise our strategy and media spend – anytime and anywhere.” – Joris Steenvoorden, Media Manager at T-Mobile
3. Adopt the right technology
Nowadays, there are hundreds of tools available with enormous capabilities. While this can bring a lot of new possibilities in a team, we have noticed that one of the top pain points of a CMO is deciding the right technologies to embrace in the business. The reason why is that CMOs have to decide which is the right technology that will save time and effort in the team, but also bring the most insights about the customers. In fact, the choice of the right platform is so significant that it can bring your company a competitive advantage by providing you with the most relevant data to make the right decisions.
As part of our solution, we have created a data layer that automatically gathers, validates, and restructures your data from a wide range of sources. This is the first step in having a holistic view of all the important metrics scattered across offline and online channels. Automating this process saves you from manually connecting sources and ensures a constant feed of high-quality data available for modelling. This considerably shortens the time to insights and ensures you will always make your decisions based on the most recent information available.
4. Leverage data in compliance with GDPR requirements
CMOs are the leaders and they inspire people to enter new realities, adopt new technologies, and of course tackle issues in a fruitful and creative way. Hence, when challenges like the death of third-party cookies arise, they have to be the first who will search for innovative solutions. Taking this into account, at Objective Platform, we created a future-proof software that still provides enough granularity without the need for third-party cookies. Even with privacy restrictions and data access limitations, you can make sure that historical performance data from users are safely kept and analysed, so you will never have to start from scratch. You can be a pioneer and work with a tool that will never be outdated and will deliver the most accurate results and insights based on the availability of data.
5. Be a thought leader
The measurement market provides a lot of potential for insights. However, implementing a marketing measurement platform won’t magically send your KPIs through the roof. Doing marketing measurement right means breaking down team silos, not just data silos. It means identifying key stakeholders in the marketing team, making sure they understand the analytics, albeit at a practical level. It means adopting a more agile manner of work and encouraging experimental learning. Only the right culture can make marketing measurement a success – especially in a cookie-less world.
Want to know more about how we can help you run complex marketing campaigns with different objectives, and across different channels (offline and online) as well as justify investments in brand marketing?
