Marketing and business technology solutions continue to advance at a rapid pace. Today’s marketers are enjoying an excess of tools and solutions to utilize when creating, executing and measuring their multi-channel marketing campaigns.
Many people, however, still think small even when they have technology capable of providing big returns. Understanding and using technology effectively is necessary to get the most out of your marketing and advertising budget.
This can be mitigated with adequate training and a proper mental approach of those using the software. Above all, marketers must have the detailed data required to create segmented, personalized marketing messages, and measure the results of each campaign.
A Comprehensive Approach To Marketing
Companies tend to measure their advertising efforts in segments instead of as a whole. However, this isn’t the way customers typically interact with a company. Measuring print, radio, email marketing, TV ads and various other advertising mediums separately doesn’t provide the whole picture, as customers typically have many different interactions with a business before leading to a sale.
For example, a potential customer hears an ad on the radio about a restaurant named Tom’s Diner and later does a google search about it. This person mentions something they learned about Tom’s Diner from the search to a friend on social media, and the friend then highly endorses the business. Finally, a coupon in the mail a week later might prompt the customer to dine at Tom’s.
It doesn’t make sense to evaluate the effectiveness of direct mail campaigns by only looking at the results of those specific campaigns over time. Instead, it’s important to look at everything together. The earlier interactions in this example were most likely required to ensure the potential customer didn’t simply disregard the coupon as junk mail.
Looking at the Big Picture
When allocating marketing dollars, it’s a good start to know how each method compares. One company that previously measured advertising separately took a holistic approach. When looking at the television advertising results, they saw this method generated little revenue for them compared to their YouTube ads and search ads. Search ads generated 25% of sales despite being 4% of the advertising budget.
These numbers do provide more insight, but not the whole picture. It’s important to know how many sales are derived from search ads when a company evaluates how to spend their marketing dollars. However, that doesn’t mean the company should decrease the budget on their TV ads and devote those resources to search ads. It’s very tempting for marketers to attribute purchase behavior to one data point, and many companies do.
What marketers must learn to understand is not just the last point that led to a conversion, but all the points that came before it, as well. Before a customer clicked on a search ad, how many Facebook ads did they view? What other interactions did they have that ultimately led to them clicking on the search ad and making a purchase?
Using Data for Marketing
It’s possible to use analytics to measure advertising campaigns over sales and media channels with predictive tools. HBR estimates that data driven changes allow for marketing performance improvements between 10-30% without adjusting a budget.
The first step in this process is gathering data. Bloom Intelligence provides a wealth of information for those who truly want to understand the way their marketing strategy works as a whole to drive sales. Bloom provides WiFi-collected customer data about popular visit times, daily traffic, churning customers, average customer repeat rates, and more. These metrics lend themselves to collection more easily, but Bloom can also help with more elusive and long-term concepts like customer loyalty.
Let’s go back to Tom’s Diner. One touch-point in this example that prompted a conversion was a recommendation from a friend. How does a business track something like this? Loyal, satisfied customers are more likely to refer their friends, and the Bloom WiFi analytics dashboard can gauge loyalty through metrics like repeat visits, customer churn rates, and the lifetime value of customers. This gives businesses valuable insights as to how their customers feel about their services and products so they can assess whether they have a great relationship with their clients, and act upon the data to improve business.
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