Being a skilled marketer is like being a skilled sportsman; many different things contribute to your overall winning performance. To succeed in digital marketing today, CMOs have to spend money on the right channels, as well as ensure granular optimisation of all activities. Measurement is what brings this together, allowing marketers to see all of their campaigns in one place and understand how they are performing, interacting and complementing each other.
When training his team, British cycling coach Sir Dave Brailsford, switched from focusing on improving one important factor to pin-pointing each of the things that contribute to performance, and incrementally trying to improve all of them – whilst each improvement seemed relatively insignificant, in combination that summed to winning improvement. Similarly, in order to measure their campaigns properly, CMOs need to understand the dependencies between each campaign element; looking at how the channels work together, means they can maximise their effectiveness.
Measurement exposes inefficiencies but it’s unlikely that marketers are going to find the silver bullet that will transform their results immediately. However, by making lots of small changes, and testing the effects, marketers can make significant improvements and ultimately, find the optimum formula for success.
In the past, channels were measured in silos because the purchase journey involved just one or two interactions with a brand. As a result, the relationships and dependencies between channels were not understood. More recently, by measuring in the context of the whole, marketers have discovered how to make their campaigns more effective overall.
The need to move away from the siloed view is even greater now because shopping journeys are getting more complex with the modern shopper. The journey to purchase used to be straightforward because shoppers were less comfortable with Google and more suspicious of display ads. Their search stopped when they found a product at a price they were happy with. On the other hand, now that shoppers know exactly what they want and how to find it, they are more likely to compare products extensively. Their search doesn’t just extend to the product anymore, but also to the cost and terms of delivery, and they’ll continue looking until they’ve found a cashback deal, voucher, or price comparison to make additional savings.
In doing this, shoppers make their path through the web much more complicated for CMOs to understand. The modern shopper visits many channels, so CMOs have to serve them consistently across numerous touchpoints, particularly because customers don’t think in ‘channels’, they see a retailer as one brand, wherever they shop.
Until recently, marketers didn’t have the technology to gather this detailed view of the customer journey but now some shrewd marketers are consolidating data across all channels, enabling them to see the most accurate and complete user journey possible. CMOs can’t afford to ignore this integrated and data-driven approach if they are to make strategic decisions about where to put their marketing budget, prove the value of their campaigns and continually improve their ROI.
The recent widespread availability of data means many marketers are collecting the right information, but failing to join it up to create a single version of the truth. Measurement needs to change in line with the complex consumer journey to give marketers a clear picture, but this means a change in approach for CMOs.
Firstly, measurement is often focused on the question ‘did it work?’ This approach ignores the fact that there can be lots of different objectives for a campaign, beyond just selling a product. In addition, whether a campaign presents valuable ROI is also dependent on the price. A campaign might ‘work’, but at an unacceptable cost.
Now CMOs are able to judge campaigns on an ongoing basis and in real-time. By measuring results from very early on, marketers can make tweaks, or even turn off a campaign if it’s not yielding results. In-campaign optimisation allows CMOs to be flexible, to test new things and to see ROI transparently, rather than having to wait for the results after it’s finished.
In addition, the modern CMO often gets wrapped up trying to understand all of the different types of marketing available to them, and forgets that impact is the objective. They should focus on trying and testing media, rather than trying to establish whether the mechanism will work before they start.
Although data-driven campaigns and continual analysis do require a movement towards using insights, this doesn’t mean that CMOs should lose their creativity. In fact, with their measurement fixed, CMOs will have more time to spend on developing ideas. Data is live and dynamic, with the ability to reveal new opportunities for marketers. From a design perspective, the effects of good creative can be seen in the data, so marketers can analyse its true impact and do more of what works, whilst rethinking what doesn’t.
With data insights at their fingertips, CMOs have decision-making power in their hands. Currently, media continues to be bought and sold according to the rates dictated by the seller. However, companies with omnichannel measurement strategies are able to understand how valuable – or not – the media is, and will be able to negotiate the way they buy and the price they pay, based on what actually works.
With a deeper understanding of how valuable the media is to them, marketers can negotiate the price based on much more than views or clicks. For example, marketers could decide to pay for clicks that perform a certain action within a time limit that suits them. By paying based on the results and not the mechanism of the media, a solution that really works for both parties can be found. The media provider can focus on performance, and brands can focus on setting the budget and the parameters for buying the media which reflect true ROI.
The purchase journey is now a huge and complex web, but with an omnichannel view of this system, CMOs can make better choices about where to spend their budget, understand how to optimise campaigns and ultimately change how they negotiate with media. Every business has different USPs, customer relationships, brand values and objectives, so it’s not possible to prescribe one approach to the measurement of marketing tactics and channels. Given the complexity of the media environment we operate in and the diversity of the modern shopper, every audience, strategy and campaign will be different. Accurate measurement is the only way to get to grips with this complexity, and it’s the CMOs that can do that who will ultimately come out as winners.
By Seth Richardson, CTO of Rakuten Marketing.
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