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Chief Marketing Officers around the world face the same challenge: controlling and allocating their marketing budget. Especially during challenging times, CMOs must make tough decisions. Should they cut staff, tech stack or media spend? Is it wise to reduce advertising budgets, and will this negatively impact sales? These are just a few of the many questions CMOs must address. While companies expect to achieve more with less, CMOs are under pressure to make impactful decisions that will maximise business revenue.
This situation requires CMOs to have a clear understanding of how budget allocation is distributed and affects sales. However, for large corporations – where marketing activities are extensive – it is difficult to monitor and maintain a clear overview of each campaign's effectiveness.
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At Objective Platform, we believe that our Unified Marketing Measurement Framework can address the challenges surrounding marketing budgets. Our sophisticated models enable you to analyse, track, monitor and predict the performance of all marketing activities – both online and offline. In this article, we have gathered the top five challenges CMOs face in budget allocation and discuss how to tackle them using our approach.
Demonstrating that your marketing spend contributes to business success can sometimes be challenging. Impressions, clicks and reach are insufficient proof to convince the CEO, CFO or any other decision-maker that your strategy impacts revenue, ROI, shareholder value and brand equity.
Our platform aims to provide all this evidence. Firstly, we create a single source of truth where all activities (both online and offline) and their results are gathered in one place. In our dashboards, you receive independent insights into the performance of all activities, where you can see, for example:
This enables CMOs to speak the language of business, providing concrete insights into the impact of each campaign and marketing effort on the company's short- and long-term goals.
As you likely know, consumers rarely move directly from the awareness to the purchase stage. Their journey is more intricate, spanning both online and offline channels, and CMOs need to identify the key channels that prompt users to convert. A holistic overview is therefore essential. For example, our unified measurement revealed that a multichannel retailer achieved a significant revenue increase by starting its awareness TV advertising two weeks before launching sales-focused online ads. According to Forrester, a unified approach to marketing activities can improve marketing budget efficiency by 15% to 20%.
In our Unified Marketing Model, you can also compare and contrast the effectiveness of various channels. For instance, you can measure the effectiveness of Facebook versus Instagram or even TV versus Paid Search Ads. Using our optimisation tool, you can develop a business plan based on forecasts, ensuring that your budget allocation is focused on the most effective channels in the user journey.
Finally, when it comes to budget cuts, you can make data-driven decisions by accounting for all factors that might influence a campaign. Our model includes external factors (e.g., seasonality, pricing) that could impact results, ensuring you have valuable insights to identify what isn’t working, where improvements are needed and where to focus 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
Today, hundreds of tools with extensive capabilities are available. While this opens up new possibilities for teams, we have found that one of a CMO’s main challenges is selecting the right technologies to adopt. CMOs must choose technology that saves time and effort within the team and provides the most insights into customers. Selecting the right platform is crucial; it can give your company a competitive edge by delivering the most relevant data for informed decision-making.As part of our solution, we have developed a data layer that automatically gathers, validates and restructures your data from various sources. This is the first step towards gaining a holistic view of key metrics across both offline and online channels. Automating this process saves you from manually connecting sources, ensuring a continuous flow of high-quality data ready for modelling. This greatly reduces the time to insights and ensures your decisions are always based on the latest information.
CMOs are leaders who inspire teams to explore new solutions, adopt new technologies and tackle challenges creatively. When obstacles like the demise of third-party cookies arise, they must be the first to seek innovative answers. At Objective Platform, we have developed future-proof software that maintains sufficient granularity without relying on third-party cookies. Even with privacy restrictions and data access limitations, historical performance data from users can be securely stored and analysed, meaning you’ll never have to start from scratch. You can lead the way by using a tool that remains relevant and delivers accurate insights based on available data.
The measurement market holds vast potential for insights. However, implementing a marketing measurement platform alone won’t automatically elevate your KPIs. Effective marketing measurement involves breaking down team silos as well as data silos. It means identifying key marketing stakeholders and ensuring they understand the analytics at a practical level. It also requires adopting a more agile working style and promoting experimental learning. Only the right culture can ensure success in marketing measurement – especially in a cookie-less world.Would you like to learn more about how we can support you in running complex marketing campaigns with varied objectives across both offline and online channels and in justifying brand marketing investments?
