Four Best Practices for Maximizing Marketing Effectiveness

By Manu Mathew On Jan 3, 2019

Today’s marketing technology landscape has created a number of obstacles that marketers must overcome in order to effectively reach, engage, and convert new and existing customers. Thanks to the proliferation of channels and devices, marketers must constantly develop and coordinate experiences that consumers find meaningful and trustworthy. In fact, 43 percent of marketers say understanding more about their customers and prospects is one of their most important objectives.

As consumer expectations and demands continue to evolve, marketers must keep pace. To create the best experiences for consumers and the greatest returns for their business, marketers must pursue an audience-centric approach to marketing and advertising that puts the customer at the center of everything they do. Here are four ways successful audience-centric companies connect their best-performing marketing to the people that matter most.

Leverage the Right Data

Each member of a marketing organization requires different types of insight, at different speeds and at different degrees of granularity in order to be effective. For instance, a CMO looking to understand the impact of each channel on total sales by quarter is very different from a channel manager wanting to identify yesterday’s top-performing display ad placement on in-store sales.

The most effective marketing organizations leverage the power of diverse analytic approaches to provide each member of the team with access to the right insights at the right time in order to inform their decisions. When marketers are able to match the right data to the right tactical or strategic action, they can better understand consumers while making smarter investment decisions within and across channels that enhance performance and reduce wasteful spend.

Take Advantage of People-Based Marketing

According to PQ Media, the average person is exposed to approximately 1.59 hours of advertising on traditional and digital media platforms per day. To break through the clutter, the most successful marketers are embracing people-based marketing practices to ensure they are delivering tailored, personally relevant messages, content, and offers at each stage of the consumer journey.

Unlike the “spray and pray” advertising methods of the past, people-based marketing enables marketers to target real people at their most relevant, receptive moments. It’s made possible by the creation of a persistent identifier that links a person to his or her devices and browsers. By providing insight who customers and prospects are and how they behave, marketers can offer better, more personalized experiences that drive revenue and create lasting customer loyalty.

Embrace Advanced Measurement Approaches

Implementing a people-based approach requires agile measurement practices that allow for more frequent analysis and optimization. Effective marketers leverage advanced measurement approaches, such as multi-touch attribution, that provide quick access to always-on marketing campaigns, so they can focus on proactive (versus reactive) optimization.

Multi-touch attribution has revolutionized marketing measurement by enabling marketers to analyze consumer behavior and marketing performance across digital channels and devices in near real-time. With multi-touch attribution, marketers can get a people-based view of consumer journey and accurately assign credit to all the touchpoints that influenced a desired business outcome, such as a lead or sale. Models that are updated daily provide the most accurate, up-to-date understanding of the tactics that influence the consumer decision process, so marketers can iterate and improve while their marketing and media are still in the market.

Stay Up-To-Date on New MarTech Developments

As new devices and channels come into play and consumer behavior continues to evolve, the importance of multi-touch attribution will only increase. Some multi-touch attribution solutions have already started to incorporate audience attribute data, so marketers can see which combination of digital marketing and advertising channels and tactics work best for each audience segment. Marketers can use this insight to create stronger connections with customers and prospects while increasing their long-term value to the business.

However, while digital ad spending may have finally outstripped TV, traditional offline advertising isn’t going away anytime soon. To maximize revenue and return across all investments, marketers need a comprehensive view of marketing performance. The most effective marketers are now starting to embrace holistic measurement solutions that combine audience-centered marketing performance data with multiple modeling methodologies. By reconciling data from multiple approaches into a single, audience-centric view of performance, these solutions deliver the speed, accuracy, and foresight marketers need to enhance the consumer experience and optimize lift and ROI across all marketing investments.

Today, the marketing landscape is more complex than ever, consumers are more demanding than ever, and maximizing marketing effectiveness is harder than ever. By embracing these four best practices, marketers can make impactful, audience-based decisions that create the best experiences for their customers, and the greatest returns for their business.