If there’s a common thread in the big marketing stories of the last few years, it’s that wins and losses are measured in terms of business outcomes, not media consumption metrics. Of course, one doesn’t go without the other, but too many marketers are absorbed by what’s right in front of them—their media plans and channel selections—and end up missing the big picture.
What can marketers do to increase their confidence?
Reexamine the role of marketing for the organization
The first priority is to get consensus on what the company is trying to accomplish. This sounds obvious, but it’s the type of soul-searching that frequently is back-burnered. Not only does it require marketers to take a pause in the daily madness, it’s also historically been challenging to align marketing approaches and metrics with business goals.
Are you trying to launch a new product? Raise your brand’s profile and improve its reputation? Acquire new customers or a new type of customer? Build loyalty and long-term value among existing customers? Boost sales or profits? At Nielsen, we’ve talked to hundreds of marketers and analyzed thousands of campaigns, and found that the most effective marketers are those who can develop campaigns that align squarely with the company’s business objectives, and measure success with metrics the C-suite can understand: not views, clicks, or likes but outcomes-minded metrics like lead conversions, cost per lead, return on ad spend (ROAS), long-term ROI and brand equity.
Combine short-term and long-term value
While it’s critical to align your goals with business outcomes, don’t overlook the role of reach and frequency as the foundation of the funnel. Marketers need to reach the right people with the right message at the right frequency at the right moment in the funnel to make impactful moments.
Doing so effectively requires a holistic approach that includes both short-term wins, as well as long-term brand building. Our research shows that some channels are really good at brand building, while others are good at converting sales, but very few are good at both. Linear TV, digital display and social media are the exception, but even those multi-purpose channels deliver better-than-average outcomes in only half of the cases, as the chart below illustrates.
With tight budgets, it might be tempting to lean in to channels that offer quick wins. But doing so without always-on upper-funnel marketing can have long-term consequences.
Nielsen research has found that ongoing marketing efforts account for 10%-35% of a brand’s equity. And the ROI norms database in Nielsen Compass highlights how the long-term impact of media can even double the impact of media spend, particularly for channels like TV and digital video.
Brand building does more than just seed long-term sales. It also moderates the cost of new customer acquisition. That’s why you need to measure it all—all channels and the full funnel—so you can plan your media strategically to drive those predetermined KPIs.
Eliminate silos and optimize effectively
For busy marketers, it’s often easier to keep media measurement separate than attempt to cobble it all together themselves. We estimate that only 28% of marketers today combine data from digital and traditional channels to evaluate the ROI of their marketing investments.
Additionally, many marketing teams today remain splintered along digital and traditional channels, or along performance marketing and brand building responsibilities—with creative and analytics, in-house and outside agencies, domestic and international teams all pulling in different directions.
Such silos prevent reach and frequency from being measured (and deduplicated) in conjunction with funnel metrics. Without optimizing campaign performance across consumer journeys from first touch point to point of purchase, you could be wasting ad spend by hammering the wrong audiences with messages—or, even worse, hurting your brand by bombarding them across all platforms.
Embrace holistic measurement
There’s no shortcut: to truly reconcile short-term and long-term objectives, marketers today need to combine multiple channels and find the media mix that works best for their business needs. And to measure the ROI of their marketing investments across so many platforms, they need an accurate count of their cross-media reach and frequency. You simply can’t optimize for business outcomes if you don’t know who is seeing your campaign, or if you can’t trust the numbers.
Holistic measurement of reach and frequency—comprehensive, independent and deduplicated—is at the heart of Nielsen ONE, the industry’s most reliable cross-media planning solution. Outcomes measurement in Nielsen ONE enables a unique view of how brand metrics and sales metrics interact so marketers can create tactical media strategies and optimize campaign performance.
