Too often these days, the message is ignored in favour of the medium, a function of both ease and the way marketing mix modelling – commonly used by marketers as a basis for their campaigns – is set up.
But the right message can have significantly more impact on a campaigns’ ROI than the most effective media with a sub-optimal message. Realising the benefits requires developing an understanding of the influence of brand attributes (the basis of messaging) over customer behaviours, and then integrating messages into the marketing mix model.
This isn’t the path most marketers take. For many, there’s easier access to media spend information than to message or campaign level attributes and spend. And, frankly, deconstructing campaigns into brand attributes and linking them to consideration and purchase behaviour is hard work.
In fact, the right messaging will differentiate your brand, drive stronger consideration and purchase behaviour, and can be significantly more rewarding than figuring out what the most effective media are. It comes from understanding the key brand attributes that drive purchase consideration and buying behaviour, and how you stack up competitively on them.
Underleveraged drivers
When the right messages are delivered through the most effective media, the results can be striking, as one leading wireless provider found. Its analysis uncovered ‘network quality’ as an underleveraged attribute, one that was highly relevant but not differentiated by most brands. While providers were investing significantly in improving their networks, this was an operational issue that marketers did not pay much attention to.
The company decided to use its superior network quality as the basis for a TV ad campaign that led to significant market share gains. It also significantly improved how customers perceived the brand – driving sales and improving other brand metrics. In this instance, traditional marketing mix models would have recommended reducing spend on TV and shifting it to online or other emerging channels, and would have made no recommendations around the optimal message itself.
Traditional marketing mix models focus on incorporating syndicated data on industry spending patterns on various media into sales response models, estimating the relative effectiveness of different media. Information around the message is not readily available externally, an issue compounded by organisational structures in which different campaigns exist in separate functional silos. A pound spent on one message is treated the same as a pound spent on another despite a difference in message effectiveness.
Developing insights on optimal messages requires hard work and involves pursuing two different paths in parallel:
Path I: Driving customer behaviour
Step 1 Track brand attribute performance: Deconstruct your own and competitors’ messages into brand attributes and track performance on those regularly using brand health trackers. Among other things, this will enable identification of whether the intended objective of communications strategy is being met. It’s critical here to track attributes at a granular enough level to ensure they are meaningful and actionable in driving message strategy.
Step 2 Derive impact of attributes on customer behaviour: What’s instrumental here is to use brand tracker data to understand which attributes in the category are key to driving consideration, purchase behaviour and recommendation. Stack this up against how you perform against competitors on these brand attributes and you are ready to make some informed messaging decisions.
Step 3 Determine implications for communications strategy: Combine results from the previous step with an understanding of the messages and customer purchase behaviours you and your competitors have experienced over time. This will create a fact-based dialogue enabling the selection of attributes for differentiated messages to drive growth.
Path II: Messages in a marketing mix
Step 1 Track spending by message: Instead of tracking spend by media alone, move to incorporate message tracking for your business and competitors into the mix, a step your agency partners should be involved in.
Step 2 Understand media elasticity by message: This requires marketing mix models to allow for the estimation of elasticities not just by media but by both media and message. To do so, plan your campaigns with sufficient variation in the media plan over time.
Step 3 Determine implications for optimal media mix: Results from the previous step combined with learnings from Path I provide a rich fact base from which to make decisions about both optimal messages and media.
Businesses are increasingly relying on marketing mix modelling to drive budgeting decisions, and that’s a good thing in a post-recessionary environment. By broadening the scope of analytics and not losing sight of the role of the message, marketers will be creating far more powerful campaigns that will push their brand and business forward.
For more on Content Marketing, visit the Content Marketing: Best Practice Guide