Brands entering a cluttered industry, or a category where one or two brands control consumers’ headspace, often feel they have a daunting road ahead. Their questions include:
— How can we capture consumer attention beyond shelf space?
— How do we compete with brands with 10x the budget expenditure?
— If I do manage to get consumers to try our brand, how do we keep them coming back?
The primary effects of cookie deprecation will be audience targeting limitations and measurement specificity. Successful marketers will need new and better ways of understanding how customers make decisions, what leading indicators drive business outcomes and how to aggregate this data to understand directional success.
For advertisers, the first year of the new decade was especially testing with nonexistent live entertainment and low prospects of major gatherings.
These unsettling realities—coupled with unpredictable consumer demand resulting from ongoing economic uncertainty—paint a bleak short-term picture for advertisers of all stripes. Alongside challenges, however, uncertainty also creates opportunity.
Where is that opportunity? For advertisers, it’s where we all are: at home, watching something on a screen. Enter CTV.
Today’s shopper is looking for authenticity in the products they choose to invest in. If a person loses trust in a brand, they are quick to pivot to a different brand offering a similar product. Brands build trust through producing quality products, living by their value statements, hiring inclusively and more. But there’s more to the story.
Programmatic video advertising is expected to grow an additional $10 billion over 2021’s monstrous growth in 2022, according to eMarketer. Many growth brands are seeing the benefits of incorporating this highly engaging medium in their marketing mix.
Twitter reports that users are 10x more likely to engage with a tweet including video, and LinkedIn similarly reports its users are 20x more likely to engage with a LinkedIn post with video embedded.
However, there are still those who are unwilling to make the upfront investment to create these assets, fearing it requires too much money and too much time. That’s understandable, especially for brands operating with a very lean marketing budget.
Read the article to learn three reasons why your brand should avoid leaving video out of the marketing strategy.
Healthcare marketing has undergone a major transformation as patients change their healthcare practices and preferences. In particular, younger healthcare consumers are changing the game through their desire to take an active role in decision-making for their health. A one-size-fits all approach with generic local TV buys is no longer sufficient to get new Gen-Z and Millennial patients to walk through your doors. Instead, it’s important to create an overarching strategy that resonates, and then tailor your messaging and marketing mix to subsets of consumers based on their values, motivations, and behaviors. Read the article to learn how to grow your reach with the younger consumer base.
Brands, especially those in the ecommerce space, often feel tempted to skip over building awareness and consideration with their marketing efforts and jump straight to conversion-based advertising campaigns. However, brand awareness is a key marketing component to fill the sales funnel that should not be ignored. Keep reading to learn how to optimize awareness campaigns to establish customer lifetime value.
If your core business goal is to drive sales, you still have to do the work to introduce your brand to new customers and convince them why your offering is worth their money.
Even on commerce channels like Amazon, Instacart or Shopify storefronts, you must establish baseline awareness before a consumer will be receptive to your product.
Forrester’s 2021 CPG Digital Go-To Market Review found, “35% of surveyed global CPG marketing decision-makers cite brand awareness as an important metric…brand metrics rank high because CPG/FMCG products are typically low consideration, making it critical for the brand to be top of mind in a category.” So before you begin investing all of your marketing dollars into ROAS focused tactics, put yourself in the consumers’ shoes and consider the information you would want from a brand to take the next steps.
To understand how much of your efforts should be allocated across awareness vs consideration vs conversion tactics, look to the purchase journey for guidance.
If your consumers move from consideration to conversion very quickly while in store or on digital retail platforms, the greatest chance to reach them is within the awareness phase. The media objective in this case is to ensure a consumer recognizes your brand when searching for products in your category.
If they spend longer in the consideration phase, you can nurture leads longer with educational content and community building. But it all comes down to understanding how your product or service fits in with their behaviors and routines.
Ensure your awareness campaign has broad reach by strategically combining various digital and physical channels. If done right, this will also create a seamless user experience across channels, even with the fragmented media landscape.
How do you know which channel mix will reach your ideal audience?
Once you’ve established awareness, the value of brand campaigns does not end. Awareness marketing aids in fostering an ongoing relationship that we fondly refer to as the loyalty loop. It initially introduces your product to new users, but then continues to establish lifetime customer value after a purchase is made.
To establish this loyalty loop, develop a clear path for your customer. Put yourself in their shoes and understand the timing they need before making a repeat or complementary purchase.
Don’t waste money promoting the same product a user has already purchased and is unlikely to purchase again for several years. Instead, remarket them with ads and experiences that reinforce their positive experience with the brand and keep them interested in future purchases. For example:
We know advertising works, but success doesn’t typically happen over night. Instead, there is a gradual impact on business results that can be tied to marketing initiatives.. It can be especially difficult to see clear and instantaneous results from awareness campaigns. However, there are strategic ways to understand your progress and ensure you’re moving the needle.
The primary goal for short-term awareness campaigns is to reach the highest volume of unique users at an effective frequency. Our general understanding is that 2-12 exposures are needed to drive action, which varies depending on effectiveness of creative and the relevancy of the brand. Balance this exposure while being mindful of over saturation.
When media metrics do not answer your business questions, the next step is to incorporate third party studies that show media impact on business results and consumers’ perceptions. These studies show the true incremental impact of awareness campaigns on business goals – whether in driving brand affinity, site traffic or sales.
These are not attribution tools, but rather studies that show correlation. The two most impactful studies for e-commerce based brands are:
Use both short and long term measurement tactics to craft a story using a mix of KPIs that show media efficiency and channel effectiveness in combination with monitoring sales overtime.
Using Facebook Lead Ads to Drive a Sales Pipeline
Our client, Grit Moto Adventures, came to us with a unique opportunity to drive sign ups for an exclusive backcountry motorcycle tour. Their unique audience would be given the option to sign up for various tours in a wide time frame. Given the time commitment and niche experienced biker audience requirements, we set a goal of driving 320 leads using Facebook lead ads.
707
Leads
$0.83
CPC
0.11%
Lead Conv Rate
Due to the advanced level of riding experience needed to take part in Grit Moto Adventures tours, the target audience was niche. Interested individuals needed experience in off-road motorcycle riding, the lifestyle flexibility to travel throughout the week, and funds readily available to book a tour. Additionally, Grit Moto Adventures was a newly formed brand with little brand awareness at the time the campaign launched. Our strategy needed to include ways to build scale despite the targeting specificities, and take interested users from awareness to conversion as quickly as possible.
Our team navigated the audience restrictions by making custom third-party data segments with the largest US consumer panel, Resonate. This tool allowed us to develop and activate a scaled audience within our two primary audience personas: general Motorcycle Riders and Retired Riders with the income required for these trips. For media activation, we chose Facebook for its ability to scale, built-in lead generation functionality, and comprehensive interest targeting.
The resulting campaign drove an engagement rate of 4.54% with an impressive cost-per-click of $0.83. At the campaign’s conclusion, 707 Facebook lead ads were filled. This was a 200%+ increase from our original goal of 320 leads. These metrics demonstrate our success in reaching highly interested people at the right time.
We learned that strategically curated audiences, paired with informative creative, drove numerous leads. This found candidates for the tours while also expanding their email list. As we plan for cookie deprecation, tools such as Facebook lead generation campaigns will be important for building first-party data. This information will be extremely beneficial for Grit Moto Adventures moving forward.
