Source: Pixabay

Digital advertisement spends are surpassing traditional ad spends (TV, print, outdoor). Most brands have shifted focus on targeting customers directly through various digital platforms to get a larger share of the sales pie.

Digital campaigns help in targeting customers at a more personalized level. An effective digital strategy involves focus on good quality content and targeting the right audience. But the key factor in nailing the right strategy is to understand which mediums and campaigns worked the best and formulating the right mix of channels for the future. An ensemble approach should be followed by the marketers to get a drill down of the most effective mediums and campaigns.

Unpacking the ensemble approach

Lets unpack the ensemble approach.

• Start by understanding the marketing mix (top down approach). How much sales have been driven by traditional vs digital marketing?. Find the return on investment for every dollar spend on the various marketing inputs.

Every marketer wishes to get a high ROI on the money spent, the idea is to not leave money on the table.

• Then understand which campaigns under each marketing effort have been the most effective. E.g. If 3 YouTube ads are being displayed, analyse which one is the most effective in conversion. This would aid in understanding which ad communicates the message in the most effective way. A drill down analysis of creatives, copy duration and genre can help in identifying the most effective ads and can help in creating a successful communication strategy.

• While understanding the marketing effectiveness, often marketers capture only the direct impact of the marketing inputs on their business metric (sales, market share etc). This leads to inappropriate attribution to the marketing inputs. The corrective measure should be to understand the indirect as well as direct impact of the marketing input to sales. E.g. Person buying a product after watching the TV ad could have watched the YouTube ad first. So, the sales have to be attributed to both TV and Digital (YouTube) touch-points. The direct and indirect analysis helps in attributing the right amount of sales to each of these marketing inputs.

• Next, understand the customer conversion path by using attribution modeling methods. This would give specific insights at the customer level (bottom-up approach) and bring out the nuances in the customer journey to conversion.

• Gather the insights from the  marketing mix and attribution modelling and get a holistic picture of effective campaigns and how much budget to spend on each.

The ensemble approach would give 360-degree insights through in-depth analysis of both offline and online touch-points and would help in formulating an effective digital strategy.

Hope you like my article. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.