Getting a return on your investment is important in whatever context you are viewing it, but marketing is sometimes not a cost that is easy to analyse accurately.
It is almost impossible to measure the success of your marketing efforts using a single tool or lone methodology, so an integrated marketing measurement approach is the only way to discover some meaningful insights and pointers to future strategies.
If you are running a promotion where you are offering free delivery on orders, you will want to see what uplift that provides in sales and if you are running a social media campaign, you will also want to be able to measure its effectiveness as well as work out what doesn’t attract customers.
The most effective way
The best returns tend to be achieved when marketers use a variety of measurement approaches in unison rather than singularly.
Integrated measurement helps to minimise any biases that may appear in one single measurement method and gives you a greater opportunity to determine the relevant positives and negatives of each one and a clearer picture of how each one supports their overall marketing strategy.
Three approaches that work
There are three measurement approaches that stand out in particular as being very effective.
The first is marketing mix modelling, which aims to quantify the impact of various marketing activities and promotions so that you can quantify the effectiveness and ROI being achieved on each one.
Media measurement involves marketers being able to more accurately measure the reach as well as cost and quality of each aspect of your marketing in order to assess performance. This approach also allows you to specifically identify the number of target customers that you successfully reached.
It is also a system that enables you to quantify the individual cost of each unique contact or response that you obtain and can also help you break this down further so that you can assess the quality of each lead and media placement information.
Attribution modelling is the other approach to consider and this is also referred to in marketing jargon as crediting converting traffic to online touch-points.
This has now become an important source of data in relation to media buying and execution of your marketing plans. You will find that online attribution is dependent on cookie data for input and this is a point to take on board, as it can result in difficulties in the level of accuracy when trying to accredit the importance of each touch-point.
The best way
The big question that most marketers want the answer to is what is the perfect way to measure integrated marketing effectiveness?
The bad news is that there is really no simple answer to that question but there are definitely a few options available to you that narrow the field down and make it easier to analyse data with as much clarity as possible.
If you were to create the ideal scenario for measuring the effectiveness of your integrated marketing efforts, it would probably involve a holistic measurement system which was able to offer a standard measurement currency as it were, so that all the outputs could then be considered as a measure of scale.
Mapping your data
If you laid out your business products and services as a though it was replicating the familiar London Underground map, you should get some idea of what you are trying to achieve and how everything interacts with each other.
If each stop was representative of an opportunity to get off and change direction or simply carry on with the journey, this is a fairly good analogy of how the typical consumer behaves, by moving from one marketing channel to the next or deciding to end their journey at a specific point.
This vision of trying to view all the marketing available in such a viewable format allows you the freedom to manipulate information obtained with a much greater sense of purpose and crucially, it allows you to see more clearly what ROI you are getting for each marketing initiative.
In Underground terminology, you get the chance to see if you have a Waterloo idea in terms of visitors or whether you have a Roding Valley, which most people probably haven’t even heard of, unless you live there!
Consider using digital dashboards as a way of measuring your integrated marketing returns and if you are not sure how to set up an effective season, it may well be worth getting some outside help to set it up, so that you can truly see how your ROI is stacking up.
