Three pillars can simplify measurement for entrepreneurs – Nielsen

Marketing budgets have always been put to the test. But the arrival of the pandemic nearly two years later and its ongoing presence continue to underscore the need to spend efficiently and effectively. It is therefore more and more important to measure accurately and holistically, especially as brands are increasingly using new channels and platforms to market their products.

After a pullback in the first half of 2020, marketers increased their spending on mass-reach channels this year. This spending is in line with the opinion of marketers surveyed for SMB’s Annual Marketing Report 2021, who named customer acquisition and brand awareness as their top priorities. In retail, for example, brands increased their advertising spend significantly in October.

Tracking ROI becomes more important as spending increases. In contrast to digital and conversion-oriented marketing, mass-reach marketing campaigns can be measured with modern Martech solutions. However, marketers often find it harder to correlate long-term sales with them than digital endeavors. And while the experience base of SMEs shows that a 1-point increase in brand metrics such as awareness and willingness to buy leads to an average increase in sales of 1%, the marketers surveyed for our annual marketing report are not convinced of their existing marketing technology. Brands with small, medium, or large budgets have an average trust in the existing martech of 16.7%. Importantly, the introduction of new platforms, devices, and channels – along with expanded privacy considerations and the depreciation of third-party identifiers – increases the complexity that Martech solutions must address.

SMEs believe that as brands become more complex, they should focus on three pillars.

• to trustThe measurement must be taken by an independent third party (not a media vendor) and paid for by the advertiser (giving full transparency directly to the advertiser).
• comparability: To understand relative performance, brands need to be able to compare channels using a consistent methodology.
• adaptability: For the largest components of a media budget, brands need to move from measuring what’s happening at the executed level to being achievable. This will help brands improve instead of just confirming that their marketing strategies are working well enough. Brands need a way to test and improve their media budget.

The measurement is made relative to the object. There is no uniform measurement solution. Martech solutions become more complex with increasing media possibilities, which can lead to confusion and even greater clarity. In the area of ​​measurement functions, marketers tell us that they are the least confident about measuring awareness, the ROI of the entire funnel, and multi-touch attribution (MTA).

Based on the three pillars of success, marketers should use solutions that enable deduplicated measurement across all channels – including digital channels that are less open (e.g. walled gardens) – and provide comparable metrics.

They should also make sure they can shuffle their investments instead of confirming that certain channels are providing a boost. The overall media response data from SMEs shows that the channel with the most investments provides the greatest boost around 70% of the time. However, there is a limit to how much lift a canal can provide. It’s the best channel to invest in only 4% of the time.

The lack of trust marketers have in measuring ROI across the funnel is not surprising, as off-the-shelf solutions don’t account for marketing efforts in the top and bottom funnel in the same solution. Marketers should be open to the dual need for short-term sales and brand awareness as well as the pillars of adaptability and comparability.

We believe there are two immediate solutions to this problem: marketers can conduct MMM studies to determine short and long term ROI and / or perform sequential optimization. MTA is the other big challenge. Marketers should ensure that their attribution solutions take into account the entire consumer journey, not just the first or last point. Because of the customization principle, marketers must constantly reevaluate their MTA platforms to ensure they are responding to prevailing market trends in terms of data availability.

As with most marketing challenges, measuring with data becomes a lot easier to work with; Data that is holistic, enables comparability and can be adapted to developments in the industry – including data relating to data protection and platform dissemination.

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