We recently reviewed a report from our good friends at JICMAIL, “Mind The Measurement Gap”. While we would recommend you all go and read the report yourself, we thought we’d sum up some of our key takeaways from the team for you here!
Clients must learn to stop focusing purely on short term KPI’s such as ROI and realise that the best strategy is a balance between short term sales and long-term brand building. Over time you will find that brand building will eventually drive your short-term sales.
On the contrary, agencies must work with clients to identify which KPI’s are the most relevant to the current campaign. Too many metrics can result in convoluted and incomprehensible results. For example, the DMA recorded 170 different metrics between its entrants last year.
This shows there is too much focus on delivery metrics (41% of recorded metrics) such as frequency and reach which are crucial to planning but fail to tell you much about the true impact of your campaign. Especially when only 17% of effectiveness measures revolve around brand building.
Multi-channel campaigns can be more effective for dual brand and response functions, but for this to work there needs to be clear communication between the acquisition and retention teams. To achieve a successful multi-channel campaign, brands need to understand the synergy between the different media channels.
For example, how TV and online video can compliment each other, or how QR codes can be the link between print and digital activity. A good way to ‘dip your toe in the water’ when exploring new channels is to test by region or to buy in a smaller volume.
One of the challenges of measuring the effectiveness of multi-channel advertising, however, is the more channels involved, the harder it is to gather a cohesive picture of the effectiveness of your campaign. The only way to counteract this is to break down the silos and work together!
We need to eliminate siloed thinking and stop looking at single channels in a vacuum and start understanding how each of the channels can work together as a cohesive whole.
We should be breaking down the barriers between silos and stop treating different media channels as lone entities and explore how they can work together. We need to stop bombarding clients with endless results and stats and instead work with clients to find out what KPI’s are key in telling their story.
Reports such as this one from JICMAIL are incredibly insightful. Why not contact our team to talk through how we use JICMAIL insight to deliver award winning campaigns for our clients!
