This post is the second part in a series. Read Understanding Leading Indicators to Track Brand Building to discover why leading indicators and brand measurement are crucial.
Brand marketers have been searching for a holy grail: The ability to link brand campaigns to sales impact towards their target audiences.
Many marketers are able to intuit that their brand is having some effect on sales. After all, there are multiple studies proving the value of a strong brand, with some finding that consistent branding boosts revenue by 10-20 percent. But outside of this high-level view of brand value, seeing how your brand campaigns affect your outcomes is a bit more of a mystery.
This has led to a bit of an imbalance between short-term and long-term marketing initiatives. For sales-focused campaigns, marketers can look at how a campaign influenced sales and optimize future initiatives based on those immediate insights. But a brand campaign doesn’t move so quickly. They can pay dividends for years – or even decades.
This means marketers need the knowledge and technology required to identify important leading indicators and optimize their campaigns to focus on those metrics. Thankfully, Marketing Evolution provides the tools to do just that.
The Problem? It’s Hard to Predict Brand Impact.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Branding has taken a backseat to performance in today’s data-driven marketing world.
This unfortunate reality has left marketers at an impasse. They need to increase sales, but their best tool for passive lead generation has limited buy-in from leadership. After all, you can’t ask your CFO to invest millions into a brand campaign that will (probably) increase your revenue over a period of five to ten years.
Then, to compound the issue, without brand tracking technology, it’s difficult to tell which brand campaigns are reaching the right customers. From there, it’s all but impossible to tell which touchpoints are effective at bringing customers into the next step of the funnel.
This isn’t the fault of marketers. Almost every marketing technology vendor hasn’t invested in the data science required to accurately predict brand impact. However, Marketing Evolution is always on the cutting edge of what marketers must do to succeed – and that’s why we’ve invested so much into proving the value of your brand with leading indicators.
How Marketing Evolution Optimizes Brand Campaigns
Marketing Evolution isn’t only a platform for pure analysis – we’ll provide every bit of assistance we can to make sure your campaign results are founded on high quality data as well. Let’s take a closer look.
1. Data Collection and Ingestion
Marketing Evolution brings data from all corners of your marketing ecosystem into a single, intuitive solution. With our API support, you can create data feeds from multiple marketing channels, helping you quickly organize data in one place. Or, you can upload your own data from sources like location-based marketing solutions.
Further, if you sign up for brand tracking, you’ll also gain access to options like sentiment analyses. We’ll do all the legwork to conduct these brand studies and feed data into the solution, following the methodology you prefer. Maybe you want to know where you stand amongst your competitors, for example – or maybe you only care if you’re top of mind.
You can then upload this data into our platform, which will convert them into leading indicators for forward-looking brand measurement. When you start with Marketing Evolution and brand tracking in general, you’ll only need to wait about 45 days for our AI and machine learning algorithm to understand the unique way that your customer’s sentiments influence sales.
Once the model has been trained, it can start to provide a forward-looking view of brand impact and directly tie that impact to sales. And as time goes on, our model will learn new ways to give your team an edge over the competition.
2. Data Analysis & Predictive Recommendations
Marketing Evolution is designed to be highly flexible. To enjoy this flexible analysis, you only need to think about what metric you’d like to optimize for and select it from a simple dropdown. In just a few quick moments, Marketing Evolution will run through all of your data and discover the best allocation of spend to maximize marketing impact using your chosen metric.
Do you want to know how to allocate spend to maximize brand consideration? That’s possible. Do you want to know where to put money to get some short-term sales now, while building brand equity? You can do that, too. The platform handles single or multi-KPI optimization without breaking a sweat. You only need to indicate how much each metric matters and the platform will do all the heavy lifting.
The list of metrics you can examine with Marketing Evolution is long and ever-expanding. However, in our experience, our customers tend to gravitate toward the following sales and brand metrics:
- Sales
- Web visits
- Brand consideration
- Brand salience
- Net promoter score
This isn’t the only way you can optimize your marketing campaigns, however. You can also optimize spend for a specific channel or touchpoint, giving you a variety of avenues to optimize both brand and performance at once.
Final Thoughts
Without a doubt, your brand is one of the most valuable aspects of your business. Just look at companies like Coca Cola, where their brand is worth more than $87.6 billion!
But in today’s data-driven environment, you need to prove what your brand is worth. You need specific statistics about how your efforts are improving your revenue – not vague platitudes that suggest the value of your efforts.
This requires purpose-built technology that uses predictive analytics to your advantage. That’s why Marketing Evolution provides a flexible, all-in-one solution for your performance and brand measurement needs. Our solution is designed to help you fulfill any marketing goal you’d like to reach – and if you’re ever unsure of what to do next, our expert consultants are ready and willing to help.
Want to see what Marketing Evolution can do for you firsthand? Sign up for a free, no-commitment demo today.
