It’s true: Marketers live and die by results.
Whether you’re on the client side or on the agency side: We all live and die by results.
After we saw how the industry was, and continues to be, focused heavily on buying power and precision but not so much on effectiveness and accountability, we named our company Effective to demonstrate to clients that performance is Job One. The programs that get renewed and expanded are the ones deemed effective.
With 28 years of experience and over $1B in media buying experience, we like to think we we know a few things about effective marketing plans. But of course, there’s more than one way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing investment.
The most common definition, a marketing plan or campaign that generates more revenue than the costs of running ads, is a simple ROI calculation. Some marketers include “fully loaded” costs, figuring ad space, production, and agency fees into their numbers.
The math is simple: Paid media has to pay. Effective helps companies make "the shift" FROM: Spending as little as possible with no idea on the returns,
TO: Investing as much as possible based on a range of positive outcomes.
The three groups all marketers fall into
When it comes to improving ROI, B2B marketers fall into three groups. The first group isn’t even looking at media ROI; they have other hard or soft metrics to gauge success. The second group wants and needs to measure ROI, but doesn’t know how. The third group knows all too well how to measure and chances are they don’t like the ROI they see. Where do you fall today and where do you hope to be in a year? Let’s look at these three
groups in detail.
Group 1: The Other KPIs
Not focused on ROI
Interested in other metrics
Performance is qualitative
Group 2: I Don’t Know
Actively working on marketing
Still learning media tactics
Not sure what to do now
Group 3: This Isn’t Working
Know how to measure ROI
Don’t like their media results
Benefits from expert guidance
Group 1: The Other KPIs
This first group isn’t focused on ROI, because they’re looking at other KPIs, such as:
Awareness
App Installs
Traffic
Engagement
Key insight: While some groups may not focus on ROI as the main measure of success, you can use some of their market approaches like co-branding to bolster your own success.
For marketers in this first group, pure, measurable ROI isn’t the goal. They could be trying to grow share of mind, or to push a user action like an app install. Creating an ROI calculation through the entire sales funnel doesn’t apply, because it’s nearly impossible to measure a squishy concept like “brand equity.”
There’s a unique sub-group in this first category. Some marketers don’t measure ROI because they already have that information -- and they use it to inform their ad buys.
Leo Flynn, VP of Strategy and Corporate Development at CDW, says CDW used such a model. Because funding for some of their marketing comes from the products featured in their ads, ad performance is secondary to the revenue earned from the participating brand.
Bob Thacker, the former SVP of marketing for Target Stores, perfected this strategy with his TV spots. He used multiple brands to pay for the cost of ads by giving them a featured placement. Brands lined up to participate as they received positive association of being one of Target’s chosen brands. They were able to show Target support for their partnership. And they got the full value of the ad impression at a fraction of the cost of buying the ad directly.
To take advantage of the huge ROI boost from co-branded ads, here are a few thought starters:
Making co-branding work for you
While you may not have Target’s media budget, a little creativity goes a long way when increasing brand outreach and simultaneously reducing ad costs.
:30/:30 Promotional Radio:
Buy :60 local radio spots, which are generally less than double the cost of :30s. Give a retailer :30 and keep :30 for the brand. Show the retailer the dollar value of the :30s and ask for in-kind in-store promotion equal to the value of the radio schedule. Pat Kane and Steve Wakeen were masters of this craft at CRN International. This model works for digital ads, CTV ads, and outdoor boards as well.
Complementary share:
Share paid media with a complimentary, “go-with” brand. Brand synergy is Stay-Puft marshmallows, Golden Maid graham crackers, and Hershey’s chocolate running co-branded s’mores ads to the same target audience in July -- which could triple each brand’s exposure and cut each brand’s ad spend by 67%.
Neighborhood Co-Promotion:
For smaller, local businesses, how could you join with other stores in your immediate area? You may share a parking lot with the store next door, so what about sharing your lists, your owned media (store signage, website, newsletters), and customer-appreciation events to expand outreach and/or reduce costs?
Group 2: I don’t know
This second group of marketers is actively working on a content and outreach strategy but isn’t quite at the level it wants to be.
Key insight: Effective has a whitepaper full of techniques to better connect the dots between B2B ad spend and incremental revenue. Read our blog post here.
Luckily, we have you covered. In our whitepaper, you’ll learn how to drive specific audiences to your website to triangulate a fuller picture of them as a potential client. By using specific
media techniques and platforms, you’ll be able to better understand all aspects of your website’s visitors, including:
their company,
where they came from,
what they are interested in,
how much time they are spending, and
the speed of their buyer’s journey.
Once you have the basics of measuring ROI under your belt, you can start layering on more advanced techniques, including improving both your audience targeting and your performance tracking.
Audience targeting improvement starts with defining your total addressable market and narrowing that TAM to the specific audience you want to convert to a customer. You can define the audience by industry name, company size, job title or skill (using LinkedIn), and/or seniority. Using Account-Based Marketing data providers, such as DeepSync, and ad platforms like StackAdapt, Effective maps target audiences to available audiences on these platforms. Job-title-specific buys eliminate wasted impressions and enable identity resolution in performance reporting.
Performance tracking improvement begins with a shift: Instead of focusing on metrics like site visits, page views, and time on site, start to investigate the quality of those hits. Visitor identification tools help us know which companies are visiting the website, and additional analytics tools take company-level engagement across paid media ads and owned media websites and organic social channels to the next level. For example, Octane 11 https://www.octane11.com/, a B2B analytics platform we love, uses the acronym FIRE for lead scoring:
F = Fit. Does this company fit with our audience target profile? Are they on our target account list?
I = Intent. Does the prospective company show signs of buyer intent, either on the website or in general?
R = Recency. Has this engagement occurred in the past 30 / 60 / 90 days (or a different time increment better matched to your sales cycle)?
E = Engagement. In what channels, how much, and with what content has the prospect engaged? This includes upper and lower-funnel messages and pages.
Once you start understanding title-based media, improving your measurement metrics, and creating a fuller picture of your target customer, you’ll leave the “don’t know how to measure ROI” group and you’ll never look back.
Group 3: This isn’t working
This brings us to the third group. These marketers know how to measure the ROI of B2B paid media, but they don’t like the numbers they see.
We spend most of our time with companies in this group, and through research and hands-on work with our clients. Effective has developed tailored approaches to improve media ROI:
Plan better
Buy better
Measure better
Step 1: Plan Better
While it’s easy to say that a better plan leads to better results, it’s also a true statement. An idea-centric, data-driven media plan is the best way to improve paid media ROI. The plan should have a clear goal and KPIs that can be measured in real time. It should leverage insights about the target audiences' drivers of engagement and conversion to purchase and their barriers to those actions.
Turn the customer decision journey into a conversation.
Key insight: An idea-centric, data-driven plan that’s measured in real time is the best way to improve media ROI.
When devising a new plan from the ground up, consider the following inputs found in Effective's Business Intelligence Audit:
Business-related research and reports
Unit and dollar sales performance
Category trends and competition
Brand-related research
Brand awareness and usage, net promoter score
Campaign recall and persuasion
Consumer-related research
Market segments, target audience insights
Consumer sentiment / social listening, ratings/reviews
Marketing-related research
Performance benchmarks, what works and what doesn’t
Marketing Mix Model research
Digital and social presence
Step 2: Buy Better
ROI improves when you use media partners or channels with track records of delivering ROI for companies with similar audiences and challenges. And it improves when you can make adjustments to the level of investment by channel, placement, audience target, and message. If you “set it and forget it,” you can forget about ROI improvement too.
Companies are full of ideas and business intelligence. A review of both digital assets and - yes, we’re serious - even physical file cabinets yields hundreds of great ideas and programs that were never executed. Companies that invest in brand marketing are long on ideas, but short on execution. Decisive strategies for pilot testing, learning, cutting underperforming programs and scaling successful concepts are critical for improving ROI.
Step 3: Measure Better
Performance reports and dashboards are great, but they can also fall victim to the trap that says “more is always better.” Numbers and results that aren’t properly vetted and targeted confuse clients and neglect the biggest questions:
What are we measuring?
How are we doing
What are we learning?
What are we doing about it?
When you see a performance report, it shouldn’t just show you rows and rows of numbers. It should clearly show if performance is good or bad, using simple visual cues: A letter grade. Red and green highlights. Plus and minus. Up and down. The hardest part of reporting is comparing goals to actual results, and then analyzing why the good stuff is good and the bad stuff is bad.
For example, Effective uses our Effective Index, which ranks our client’s brand against competitors on ad spend, website visits, search, social, reviews, and revenue. Based on that data, we create a proprietary Share of Everything analysis that calculates market share of each and, if possible, the cost per point of share. Brands with more market share than share of voice rank higher on the Effective Index than those who are spending media dollars but aren’t reaching the same share of market.
The Effective index compares share of voice, measured by ad spend, in the first column and compares it to total share of market in the second column. The resulting ratio, positive or negative, is the Effective Index.
ROI improvement is a click or call away
Need help standing up an ROI-focused paid media plan? Want to build a co-branded marketing program? Want to plan, buy and measure better? Email Sam@effectivemc.com or book an appointment: https://calendly.com/effective_marketing/30min
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