A recent study from American Express highlighted that a third of chief financial officers are planning to increase their investment in advertising, marketing and PR over the next 12 months and 57% plan to maintain previous levels of investment. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

However, the study also showed that only 8% of CFOs see recruiting marketers as a hiring priority. If this suggests that CFOs are comfortable with the reality of losing marketing staff, then the outlook for marketing departments over the next year looks more ambiguous.

The reactions presented in the research echo the current climate of uncertainty. The post-Brexit and pre-general election state means the future for UK businesses is harder to predict than usual. Depending on what happens in politics, consumers could change their spending dramatically, or not at all, and CFOs appear to be planning for all scenarios.

So how do marketers manage measurement when they’re faced with this type of landscape? Here are some tips to help you plan.

1. Consider the value of real, contextual insights

Campaign planning based on contextual insight is driven by real behaviour rather than demographics. Our recent research with ExchangeWire, Digital Reimagined: Context and Predictability, showed that over half (51%) of digital planners find demographics of little use to segment and deliver personalised experiences to consumers. Although they give insight into groups, they don’t account for individual behaviour, and this is becoming more and more important for brands to understand because general behaviour it’s getting harder to predict.

Gone are the days where people will walk straight into a shop and buy a product – their path to purchase is complex. More channels and choice means consumers yield more power over brands. They can research alternatives quickly so the next best product is always close by. This uninhibited customer makes forecasting challenging and it means marketers must think carefully about where they place their budget.

Building campaigns and engaging consumers based on behaviour data, rather than assumptions is allowing brands to put in place campaigns that drive tangible results. Because the campaigns are based on real insights, this makes the customer’s experience personalised and therefore more effective. Marketers are turning to these contextual insights to boost the relevance of their ads (43%); improve the perception of their brand (42%), and to drive footfall to physical locations (41%).

2. Explore channels that are easy to measure and demand more accountability from partners

In light of the need to prove value, CMOs are going to move marketing budgets into channels that make proving ROI easier for them. Ultimately CMOs are realising they need solid, measurable business results, which are robust and independently verified. This means a move away from traditional media metrics like reach and frequency towards sales or proxies such as store visits.

This type of measurement reflects a need for more accountability and transparency across the industry and marketers should be demanding this of the partners they work with. It’s the only way they’ll be able to stand up in meetings and say “This is how much business was driven as a result of this campaign”.

Location technology is providing these measurable data points because it’s truer than other channels; it’s based on how audiences really move from place to place. Where people go shows customers’ intent much more clearly than a search or social post ever will. And because location insights are valid they are extremely powerful when actioned and fed into the wider business strategy. Location is allowing CMOs to prove which campaigns and strategies are impacting the bottom line.

3. Find your staying power by showcasing marketing’s power to aid other departments

The average tenure of a CMO is two years meaning building relationships and proving ROI is everything. To do this, marketers need to move from talking about how they benefit marketing, to showing their value in providing vital insights that can benefit the whole business.

For instance, as the consumer journey is now more complex, it’s unrealistic to think that someone searching for a store and then visiting it to make a purchase isn’t connected. Brands have to be able to join the dots if they’re going to fully understand the customer journey and then be able to connect with people in specific moments. Our research showed that 41% of marketers use contextual targeting to drive people into a store or specific location; mobile location technology allows them to bridge the online and offline worlds to drive real-time behaviour and get people into stores to make purchases.

In addition, by understanding past or habitual location visitation behaviours, location can be used to build pictures of audiences who regularly visit specific places and the relationship between one place and the likelihood of visiting another. For instance, our technology has seen a high correlation between airports and pharmacies. Around 70% of people who visit an airport and a pharmacy did so within three days of one another. Therefore we are able to tailor messages to consumers and predict their behaviour to make marketing a powerful contributor to customer acquisition.

With market uncertainty so high, marketers must put in place best practice strategies for measurement in order to remain influential within their organisation long term. Location contextual insights provide powerful intelligence around future behaviour. This not only opens prime opportunities for brands to target audiences in the right moment based on where they are but the results of the campaign are easily correlated to the number of people walking into the store and making purchases. The marketers that will win out are those that can prove that they’re directly influencing sales and proving their value to the wider business.

 

By Theo Theodorou, EMEA general manager at xAd

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus