Challenger brands often succeed thanks to a scrappy, nimble ‘underdog mentality’ – but they can lose that edge as they grow. Coegi’s director of marketing and business strategy, Elise Stieferman, argues that as brands grow into household names, it’s important to keep thinking like an underdog.
Author: Elise Stieferman
Marketing Insider – 4 Ways To Create An Effective Media Strategy
The martech and data ecosystem is anything but straightforward. A constant influx of new technology, platforms, regulations and trends make it overwhelming for marketing practitioners to choose the right strategies, let alone for non-practitioners to fully understand. This confusion can cause marketers to throw up their hands and say “well, this is how we’ve always done it,” creating a dangerous confirmation bias. And then executives are frustrated when this same marketing strategy doesn’t offer a crystal clear ROI.
However, with a sound strategy based in data and curating continual insights, you will not only be driving success for your marketing team, but also winning over the brand executives.
So here are four ways marketers can build an effective marketing strategy that leading executives can get behind.
AdExchanger – Higher CPMs are Worth It
You get what you pay for. This adage is considered way too infrequently in the world of digital advertising, especially programmatic. There is so much pressure placed on gaining efficiency, both in execution and cost, that marketers have begun to prioritize “added value” impressions over meaningful business results.
But efficiency, while important, does not equate to effectiveness.
So how can marketers change the narrative around programmatic CPMs? Read the article to find out.
MediaPost – What Brands Can Learn From Retail Media
Early entrants in the loyalty marketing space are seeing the enormous opportunity this data holds for their own companies as well as other brands looking to reach those same consumers. Furthermore, brand marketers without access to these robust customer databases are realizing they need to find long-term targeting solutions (and fast) as they face the impending challenges of the cookieless future.
Thus, retail media networks were born and have exploded, with a new solution seeming to emerge every other week. Read the article to learn what brands can learn from retail media’s success.
MarketingProfs – Top 3 Ingredients of a Smart B2B2C Marketing Strategy
Marketing leaders across industries such as pharma, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing have multiple stakeholders to consider when developing an effective marketing strategy.
On the one hand, as a marketer you have to influence business decision-makers and convince them that your product or service is superior to competitors’, offering greater value. On the other hand, you have to provide sufficient education to those decision-makers so they feel comfortable and competent enough to sell the offering to your other target audience: the consumer.
That relationship constitutes what marketers call a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) model. And that model can be daunting if you don’t have a recipe for success.
MediaPost – How to Move from Challenger Brand to Household Name
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?
MediaPost – Why Your Brand Could Lose By Not Investing in Video
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.
Marketing in the Metaverse: Three Things to Know
If you’re reading recent marketing articles, or even watching the Super Bowl, then you are certainly familiar with the “metaverse.” But, do you understand what it means?
If the answer is no, don’t worry – you aren’t alone. The metaverse can be confusing. It isn’t tangible and it isn’t just one thing. It’s a collection of technologies, identities, philosophies, and experiences that all level up into a digital sphere, which in some way imitates real life. And consumers, especially digital natives, are quick to adopt AR/VR, social communities, and more.
What Should Brands Do To Market To Their Target Audiences In The Metaverse?
- Make digital experiences accessible and seamless
- Select metaverse-related trends that are best suited for your customers and your brand
- Drive innovation that’s focused on business outcomes
Making Digital Experiences Accessible And Seamless
There’s a reason why metaversal experiences are catching on: consumers are attracted to immersive environments. This is especially true when it comes to testing products, planning trips, and getting to know brands. Brands need to consider this as they explore their roadmap of digital development. Invest in ways to make your websites, social instances, and overall digital presence attractive for customers and drive affinity through positive virtual interactions.
Selecting Metaverse Trends That Are Best Suited For Marketing To Your Customers
Brands are chasing after an impossible dream if they try to dive all at once into every new trend within the digital universe. Throwing everything at the wall just to see what sticks is expensive, time consuming, and likely to confuse the consumer rather than drive them to your brand. Instead, it’s important to have a deeper understanding of your customer and identify what will actually increase brand value and improve customer loyalty. Maybe you don’t need a purchasable NFT or gamified shopping experience. It’s important to not be distracted by the novelty and instead focus on creating the best solutions for your brand and its customers.
Driving Innovation That’s Focused On Business Outcomes
Many brands are knee jerk reacting to what’s capturing headlines and straying away from an overarching media strategy. But, testing innovative ideas without the end business goal in mind, or simply out of fear of missing out, does not result in greater brand affinity or revenue. Innovation must be grounded in doing something new that will fulfill a need of the consumer in a way that either excites or delights them. That’s what builds word of mouth and keeps them coming back for more.
The metaverse is going to grow and evolve as emerging digital technologies gain traction and improve through AI. Marketers need to stay up to date with these changes, while not losing sight of their business goals. Before diving head first into the latest metaverse marketing tactic, evaluate:
- Are your current metaversal experiences optimized?
- Will adopting this tactic benefit your customer?
- Will these time and monetary investments improve your business’s bottom line?
For more insights, view our webinar on-demand: The Metaverse, Crypto, & NFTs: What Marketers Need to Know.
3 Key Steps To Maximizing Your Marketing Campaign’s Success
When developing a robust marketing campaign strategy, there are many different components to consider to drive success. For example, who is your target audience? Where do they spend their time? What do they care about? When are they most engaged?
The common denominator of all those questions is the consumer. Without understanding the persona you are reaching, your marketing strategy will fail to meet goals and expectations. The best way to ensure your campaign reaches the identified goals and KPIs is to take an audience-first approach. Place the consumer at the center of the strategy then base your campaign choices on those individuals.
Finding your ideal audience
Sometimes it is challenging to know who the “ideal audience” is. It often involves a lot of considerations such as customer lifetime value and advocacy. However, while often a substantial time investment, it is the most critical step in having a successful marketing campaign strategy. Here are some tips to better understanding your current customers and prospective consumers:
- Analyze your first party data: What makes your core customers similar and how can you use those learnings to find new prospects, and looking at historical quantitative and qualitative data to understand who your “best” customers are to-date
- Review Google Analytics data to reveal key insights: By looking at data cuts such as demographics, interests, and geos, your brand can gain some insight. Find out who your current customer is and ways you can use targeting them.
- Place a pixel on your site: This let’s you go a step further than Google Analytics and understand where your audience is highly indexing in terms of behaviors, interests, and demographics
- Use audience research tools: By using panel-based research, you can better understand consumer thoughts, opinions, and decisions that are driving behaviors
Maximizing campaign success through placements
Identifying the right media channels should be a balance of your business objectives and the audience scale on each platform.If the goal is to truly get in front of as many people as possible, billboards may be best investment.However, if you need a more targeted approach with cost-efficiency metrics to optimize against, understand creative performance that is moving the needle, and gain insight into your top performing audiences, digital is likely the way to go.
Now, whether you choose video, social, display, or search depends on your goals. However, having a full-funnel strategy is almost always the ideal way to guide the consumer journey.
Cutting through the clutter with the ideal message
Consumers are confronted with thousands of ads a day, which makes it easy for them to ignore. So how do brands make an impact? For many, the answer is personalization. Personalization can mean a lot of different things. And, it can be done effectively without feeling invasive. Personalization can include aligning copy and messaging to:
- Your audience’s interests
- The time of the day for the consumer
- The location of the consumer
- The consumer’s stage of life
- The consumer’s demographics
- Where the consumer is in their journey with the brand
It’s also important to consider what is distinctive and relevant. Distinct brand assets are consistent sensory & semantic cues (i.e. colors, logos, taglines, jingles, etc.) that makes it easier for consumers to identify your brand and recall the selling points associated with it. Yet, understanding the most impactful components of a creative requires analysis. This can involve A/B testing various messages, imagery, and CTAs. It can even be conducting a panel-based survey to hear first-hand from consumers. Brand growth occurs when marketers leverage their distinctive brand assets effectively to build mental availability with the consumer.
Determining marketing campaign success
Evaluating whether your marketing campaign was a success depends on your definition. Coegi always aligns the campaign measurement strategy to business goals; however, how granular the measurement insights are dependent on client expectations. If the goal was awareness, some brands feel satisfied by hitting an ideal reach and frequency. Thus, using media metrics will be sufficient. However, if a brand wants to show an incremental life in unaided brand awareness, that will require an advanced measurement strategy.
At the end of the day, remember is to prioritize the data that matters most to your business. Don’t get distracted by vanity metrics that do not answer the question of whether you achieved your company goals.
