Opinion
All elements of the funnel Looking at live data to identify current and future trends, Felix examines how such data can be used to support successful marketing strategies.
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ith so many disparate businesses cropping up in the digital media space, the choice advertisers face to maximise their business goals is becoming ever more convoluted. With this in mind, we have put together five essential tips to help the market choose the right route to achieve these goals.
• Establish the KPI Focusing on a clear outcome for every campaign is the fundamental cornerstone of every successful campaign strategy. Without a clear vision of the desired outcome, campaigns run the risk of being spread too thinly against a backdrop of KPIs which can distract from the overall objective. Marketers often come under pressure to adapt their focus or switch KPIs midway through a campaign, especially if results are not instant. This is especially prevalent in the digital ecosystem where the flexibility offered by many platforms makes this relatively easy to do compared to traditional media. However, this can result in significant wastage. The benefits of data rich digital media mean minimising wastage should be at the core of digital strategy. Therefore, to fully take advantage of the complex algorithms that the form the fabric of the majority of digital platforms, clear direction towards consistent objective is essential. Without this, key learnings that inform optimisations are diminished and can lead to an effective reboot of a campaign.
• Choose the most effective media mix When considering the right channel mix, the key thing to revert to is the KPI. Sales, clicks, views, CPA, viewability and so on; the digital ecosystem allows for all options. Given the stayat-home nature of our current situation, we are unsurprisingly experiencing an acceleration in eCommerce. The major players in the market, such as Amazon and eBay, are capitalising on existing infrastructure. We can learn from this. We must ask ourselves what infrastructure is already in place for advertisers, how we can take advantage of it and what channels complement these methods. As an example, if the business has an existing eCommerce website, the sage advice is to start with paid search and build upon that. However,
given the current situation, many companies find themselves with existing relationships with retailers to maintain, rendering this a less preferable option. We must then consider what channels can enhance their current position and work for their partners. The sharing of data here is essential and cross channel amplification will be a key pillar of shared success in 2021 and beyond. We need to consider that all elements of the funnel work in tandem and across all areas of digital media we can utilise both brand building elements and performance, ensuring they are working as hard as they can for each other. Remaining in control of all elements of the funnel, both digital and traditional is key to this. It is essential to work with partners who can provide this holistic view. For example, by tracking and optimising the impact of TV and Digital for one of our clients, we were able to decrease the average ACOS across their Amazon portfolio to less than 5% (having started at >10%).
• Identify what you can track Tracking activity from a campaign’s start to finish is every business’s ideal situation. However, this is often complicated by issues such as managing multiple stakeholders, licensing partners and distribution channels amongst others. The focus should therefore be shifted to the existing data to identify what can be leveraged to enhance campaigns. If consistent sales data or audience behaviour can be ingested into active campaigns, this can only be beneficial to optimisations. However small the observation, we need to remember it can have a significant impact to the overall result.
• Attribution Attribution is always convoluted when it comes to the toy market. With compliance issues around tracking and the often-blocked ability to see the full consumer journey, attribution is an incredibly hard thing to verify. UTMs are the basic level of information many businesses rely on, but if verification or data collected with consent is available, alongside metrics such as lifetime value and returning purchasers, we can gain insight into the overall structure. This can be built upon and used to benchmark expansion. As we observe
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Felix Lewis associate director of digital - Generation Media
the shift towards a cookieless world, the strongest advice we can give to advertisers is to enhance their 1st party data set and ensure this is as robust as possible. Once verified this can be used as the foundation of future campaigns and ensure you are capitalising on your owned channels.
• Reporting Over the past few years, reporting has become essential for last minute optimisations. Reactions to current trends gives businesses a chance to create gains (or, if implemented poorly, losses) in very little time. The developments in real time reporting and visualisation dashboards are not to be underestimated and companies all around the world are now exploiting their historical data to predict future trends without needing to rely on outside studies. It is important to make certain you are not drawn in purely by visuals and ease of use alone. A successful dashboard will be underpinned by a robust dataset, in some cases supplied by multiple sources. It’s important to ensure that those in control of the reporting and visualisation have a comprehensive understanding of all the data being in order to create actionable insight. In partnership with our sister company Giraffe Insights, we are continuously work on the creation of and interpretation of live data to identify current and future trends, in order to better inform the strategies needed to achieve our clients’ goals. Without this, marketing to children and parents alike in 2021 would be a very tricky business.
