For decades, marketers have used traditional channels such as print, radio, TV, yellow pages and outdoor ads to reach consumers. But the digital revolution has proved disruptive to traditional marketing approaches. TV, radio, print, and outdoor now work alongside digital marketing – search, organic and paid search, email, social, and video.
The growth of digital has given rise to a new category of addressable channels – where individual, user-level data is available to track touchpoints in the consumer journey. Estimates of how many people might have seen your message have given way to knowing the location, device, time, browser, and action of every consumer touchpoint online. With greater access to data about consumer behavior, marketing could be transforming from an art to a science. We’ve moved from “spray and pray” to targeting with the precision of a surgeon.
But the initial euphoria of digital marketing has given way to some sobering realities. We’ve learned these channels exist in silos. That it’s incredibly difficult to follow customers and prospects across multiple channels and devices, and even harder to find out which marketing and advertising is effective.
Being able to reach and engage your best customer as they move along a tangled digital path requires sophisticated understanding of tools and tactics and clear strategy and vision. But the strategies and technologies that marketers have relied on for years to target, analyze and optimize their marketing and advertising campaigns have not evolved fast enough to keep pace with these demands.
EYEBALLS DON’T EQUAL VALUE…
To truly understand the value of each consumer interaction with your brand, it’s not enough to count impressions, eyeballs or measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing using the consumer’s last interaction with your brand (i.e. last-touch metrics). You need to know the effectiveness of each marketing touchpoint in every consumer journey regardless of where those touchpoints occur. Yet tracking and attributing customer and prospect activity can be arduous. There’s more data than ever before and it’s scattered across silos. Marketing and media campaigns span different devices that consumers use simultaneously. Marketers are forced to “stitch” together incomplete data sets when determining the effectiveness of a particular tactic – digital or physical. They’re left in no better place than when they started their analysis – making decisions by intuition.
These marketers all have one thing in common – they need to know if their marketing and media is positively impacting their desired objective and, if so, by how much. Fusion Media has helped our clients with cost-effective research and customized dashboards to help bring clarity to their advertising’s effectiveness and measure its ROI. Let’s talk.
