Do you know what effect your marketing activities have across various channels? If the answer to that question is no, you’re not alone. The 2018 "Advertiser report" carried out by the Norwegian Association of Advertisers indicates that as many as 83% of marketers find cross-channel effects difficult to assess.
In this article, we take a closer look at five of the most common headaches faced by marketers today and solve them – once and for all.
Marketing campaigns generate masses of data across different channels. The key to measuring cross-channel effect is merely to structure and visualise the data in one place. By gathering all your campaigns, marketing activities and surveys, you can perform efficient analyses and see precisely where and when marketing drives sales. Then you can modify and optimise your investments.
You probably recognise the quote “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. This is also true in marketing. To continue moving in the right direction, you need to learn from your history of marketing activities.
By gathering and storing all your campaigns and data in a marketing dashboard, you can resolve this challenge. A marketing dashboard keeps you and your co-workers up to date with ongoing activities and the results of previous activities. You can store lessons learned and share them with colleagues and agency partners. If you store what you have learned in a marketing dashboard, you also ensure that you retain this knowledge even when someone chooses to leave your company.
Gathering data is often time-consuming. So much so, that you may find it difficult to find time to analyse ongoing activities. Marketers often spend months collecting data, only to realise that the challenge they set out to resolve has become obsolete.
In a marketing dashboard, you automate the gathering and reporting of data based on your own specifications. This process can reduce the amount of time you spend on these activities by up to 70%. Your reports are automatically updated when new data is imported, leaving you more time to analyse and optimise your marketing.
New marketing channels and technology make it increasingly tough to identify the marketing activities that are most effective. However, measuring both long and short-term effects in the same platform allows you to track the activities that are effective and observe which KPIs they affect.
According to the publication “The Long and the Short of It” by Les Binet and Peter Field, marketers tend to use short-term online metrics as primary performance measures, and this has negative implications for long-term success.
Forrester’s Predictions 2019 shows that as many as 50% of CMOs want to reinstate brand value as their no. 1 priority.
If you wish to achieve a balance between your short and long-term marketing strategies, it is important that you remember your marketing basics. With whom are you communicating? Where will you reach them? What influences them? You need to have a clear understanding of what drives your traffic, sales and brand KPIs – and how your brand drives sales. Set clear objectives and don’t forget to separate these goals (communication, sales, traffic) from the levers you apply to achieve them (reach, frequency, spend).
Once you have the fundamental factors in place, measuring short and long-term effects becomes much easier.
In the digital economy, where the sheer number of data sources and KPIs is expanding all the time, measuring the effects of marketing activities and ensuring that you continue to learn from them are becoming increasingly complicated.
Fortunately, there is an easy solution to most challenges associated with measuring effect: a tool for gathering, visualising and analysing data that gives busy marketing departments and their partner agencies all the insight they need to make wise strategic decisions.
