Marketers, facing an increasingly fragmented world of consumer attention and media channels, are starting to rely more on tools that leverage data to drive decisions and find a competitive advantage.
Over the past few years, marketing analytics has reached a tipping point where it is a must-have for brands both large and small. Marketing attribution — the science of clearly identifying the parts of the marketing mix that are driving business results — has had a remarkable impact on the way businesses make decisions about their marketing investments.
The most advanced marketing performance tools deliver insights about things like which messages appeal to which people in which channels, and they contain the key to finding optimal reach, frequency, targeting strategies and budget. Product improvements are delivering an even more granular understanding of message sequencing and can also optimize for the messages that would next be best for multiple audiences, all of whom may be in different stages of the buying process.
A few solutions are even able to include consideration of external factors such as weather and traffic patterns as they calculate the path to higher marketing ROI. What’s more, today’s solutions can deliver optimization decisions so quickly that marketers can leverage these insights while campaigns are live, rather than having to wait for months to see results.
Choosing to use a unified measurement platform is the first step of a journey to unlock the powerful decision-making power of these new tools. This guide, developed with input from the experience of others who have transitioned to a unified measurement tool, gives some practical, step-by-step advice to help your organization avoid some common pitfalls and realize the full benefits of higher marketing ROI more quickly.
We’ve developed this quick guide based on the popular Crawl, Walk, Run framework.
The goal for this stage of the journey is getting to a first optimization of the marketing mix as quickly as possible.
Early in the process, it is helpful to identify potential “power users.” Their ground-floor knowledge of the platform and their early involvement will become invaluable as you move through later stages. Make sure you include your agency(ies) at this stage: Their early involvement is crucial.
The following checklist can help identify critical requirements for implementation of a unified measurement platform and ways to gain quick, highly impactful wins.
There are four foundational elements to the Crawl stage that we’ll want to put in place:
The Crawl stage checklist: how to know when you’re at this stage
The overarching goal of the Crawl stage and a key part of moving to Walk is building the team’s confidence in the software and its recommendations. Realizing gains from implementing those “quick win” optimization recommendations early in the process goes a long way to building enthusiasm.
Early success, often achievable within the first 90 days, can accelerate the pace of adoption and give your company a distinct competitive advantage.
The Walk stage is about earning more significant wins and making the attribution tools a part of the everyday process for the marketing team and agencies. We also recommend leveraging the early involvement of power users to get certified and help train others on the team to use the tools.
In the Walk phase, we transition to using the planning software as the starting point for media planning. During this phase, the goal is to build momentum by leveraging the data and insights gained during the Crawl stage to apply to all marketing initiatives and advertising campaigns.
In the Crawl stage, teams organized around the definition of success, RACI, data flow and early wins. Data were verified and the first optimization(s) were generated. The team may have implemented some of the recommendations, or they may have decided to “take it all in” and prepare to make changes during the next optimization round.
The Walk phase is about working toward having marketing plans generated automatically by empirical data that’s fed into your unified measurement platform. The other essential characteristic of the Walk phase is the transition to more extended-range marcom planning driven directly by data and the decision-making power of the unified measurement platform.
The Walk stage includes:
The Walk stage checklist: how you know you’ve arrived
In each phase, much of the groundwork is laid for the next. Setting yourself up for success in continuous measurement is critical at the end of Walk.
As you transition to Running, the team will be familiar with the optimization cadence and confident in their ability to lead the process. The goal here will be to expand the use of the unified measurement platform and unlock the full potential of the decision-making power of the software for the entire marketing effort.
The Run stage includes:
The Run stage checklist: how to know you’ve arrived
If you’ve read this article, you’ve likely recognized the opportunity unified marketing measurement represents and are eager to realize the full potential of an omnichannel optimization solution.
If, however, you are still using an older or more siloed approach to assessing your marketing effectiveness, such as Marketing Mix Models (MMM) or Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), you may be frustrated in your attempts to get a complete picture of your marketing effectiveness. We’d suggest learning more about unified measurement, which experts consider to be the best practice for achieving marketing efficiency and making a greater impact in the marketplace.