How Brands In Asia Can Measure Advertising in 2020

It wasn’t long ago that marketing and media research teams had a simple job of sending out surveys to consumers to come up with the simplest of solutions in order to understand both consumer behavior and how to influence it.

But that’s just the beginning of an evolving story now.

With new advances in media measurement models and incremental spending being evaluated down to the penny thanks to AI and other new innovations in measurement- both marketing research teams and marketing execution departments are finding themselves in a bind when it comes to how to both understand their marketing data and how to prioritize in a way that will actually drive a return on investment for the business.

Leaving them often asking the question,

“With so many paths to the consumer, how do we approach measurement in this new digital era?”

Thankfully, there are answers, and to win the race to succeed in the new digital era, you’ll have to take a step back and start simply by asking the right questions that can get you to the finish line, here’s how.

Start by better defining your outcomes

In this new digital era, the customer is up for grabs, anyone with a dollar and good copywriting skills and can draw a conversion in, so how do you compete?

Well, if you’re going to win a race, you have to know where the finish line is.

The best way to approach measurement in 2020, is to begin by developing a collective set of objectives and do the work into defining what those outcomes need to be.

For example, do you want to…

Increase in brand impact by 20%?

Grow brand equity by 30%

Drive sales by 30%?

Marketing measurement teams don’t have to luxury anymore to experiment as much as they used to, now they have to come up with a set of clear outcomes in order to help their marketing departments engineer a digital ecosystem that will drive the customer and brand toward the end outcome.

How to design this ecosystem?

Create an “Objective-Based” Marketing Funnel

What’s the common law in marketing?

8-touchpoints to reach a consumer and influence a purchase.

But does this still work?

Maybe, or at least that used to be the truth.

With new digital innovations in multi-touch attribution, we’re learning more about how consumers can travel from touchpoint to touchpoint and then toward the purchase and it’s changing what we know about what drives purchasing intent.

So, how do you build a predictive measurement process that allows you to reach your consumer in a way that will drive your sales goal?

You build a funnel based on objectives, not traditional methods.

Let me explain, traditional funnels are built based on

AWARENESS=INTEREST=CONVERSION

But, a larger brand objective-based funnel can be built based on:

BRAND RECOGNITION=BRAND EQUITY=BRAND SALES

It's very similar to a traditional model, only what you’re doing is organizing your priorities based on metric objectives so that they purposely support one another as oppose to separating them.

Just by making this simple switch in priority, allows you to organize and priorities your goals so that you have alongside them the basic fundamentals that both win customers over while driving sales at the same time.

While defining your outcomes, and developing your objective-based funnel can be a journey of exploration- creating the measurement process that achieves the objectives while driving the consumer toward a sale is a whole other journey.

So, how can you come up with the best KPI’s?

Invest in ROO’s that Drive Your ROI

To create and prioritize the activities that take place within the funnel, you have to again go back and know what the finish line looks like and how much energy (or in this case media investment) it takes to get there.

After all, anyone can create a goal of a million dollars in sales, but developing the micro-objectives and KPI’s that will get you there is another story.

While there are many approaches to defining the ROI of your media spend, the best way is often to perform what’s called a Marketing Mix Model.

This is often done by research agencies or data scientist who can take your past marketing data to identify patterns that can tell you what channels where the most effective, what activities provided the most return, and essentially based on how much money you spent, what you received in return- or in other words, your average ROI.

For many companies, knowing the ROI and where to attribute success is the key to everything and in most cases, they can now increase their ROI by switching investments to channels or activities that are working.

But, in 2020, there will be more to marketing than just ROI and short terms sales.

To win, brand and startups alike will have to learn how to run marathons, not just races.

To do this, brands in 2020 will have to start looking at Return on Objectives (ROO) alongside their ROI and how that can make their objective based funnel effective and longer-lasting.

Let me explain,

If your Objective-Based funnel looks like this

BRAND RECOGNITION=BRAND EQUITY=BRAND SALES

The only possible way to drive customers through this while measuring this effectively is to take the data that was used to develop your ROI and key success factors then use that to identify the channels, indicators, and gauges that got you there.

For example, if we know what our ROI is, we can backtrack through the same data that gave us that ROI to identify best performing channels-most effective campaigns-success gauges within those campaigns — and then the individual metrics behind each area to define the tactics and results per tactic (key performance indicator) that need to be achieved for growth.

What happens when you do this appropriately, is you suddenly are able to assign each stage of your funnel with reach, impressions, engagements, clicks, TOS, and conversions either collective as a value score or individually -creating a collective set of metrics needed to be achieved at each stage of our funnel to keep sales growing.

We’ll be talking more about funnels in the next couple days along with ROO and ROI’s, but for now- if you want to begin a better measurement process for next year, start here and map out how your target customer’s intent matches your desired brand outcomes and have fun seeing what that tells you about setting up your KPI’s and how you can set up the appropriate A/B test that works for you.