Marketing Planning

Accuracy First, Scale Second

Terrence Quah

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“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Your hands can’t hit what your eyes can’t see”, boxer Muhammad Ali once said. 

And this statement holds true in marketing. So how can we achieve accuracy in our digital advertising campaigns before scaling them? Here are some tips.

Measure results based on your objectives

One of the common frustrations we hear from marketers is how they measure results that contradict their objectives. 

For instance, a marketing team may have booked a Youtube masthead due to its potential reach, but the campaign's success is measured based on the number of forms completed from the landing page but not measuring the awareness generated from this awareness campaign. 

In this instance, they are trying to measure acquisition against an awareness campaign. 

In other instances, a typical campaign launch looks like this. For example, a brand decides to launch a new product, provides the creative to country teams for media buying, the country teams may adapt the creative for various platforms.

During the WIP meetings, they start to measure the campaign based on the sales generated in the first week and this will be a problem because they are measuring an awareness campaign based on the volume of sales generated. So when the sales figure are not where they should be, the marketing team will start optimising for sales, even though this is a brand-new product launch and the initial objective of the campaign was to drive awareness. 

As the campaign progresses, they start to optimise for end-of-funnel activities. And when the campaign ends, they will attribute results to channels that have driven sales, which is not the objective in the first place because the initial goal was to tell people about the new product and then nurture them to convert. 

Have a clear hierarchy of goals and KPIs

While looking at the customer journey as a whole, marketing teams need to have a clear hierarchy of the goals and KPIs they are trying to achieve. 

Marketing teams should allocate budgets based on their business objectives. For example, if the priority is to drive sales, one should allocate the bulk of the budget for end-of-funnel activities. Teams need to have hard conversations on where to allocate budgets at different stages.

Conclusion

Both precision and accuracy are possible only when the goals and KPIs have hierarchies and we measure results based on campaign objectives. Only then can the marketing department move from being a cost centre to a profit centre and drive data-driven activities and decisions based on goals and not each stage of the funnel in isolation, which is what most do. 

 

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