Category: Marketing Strategy

Gaining Traction on YouTube for an Agriculture Brand

Posted on by Coegi

The Brief

An agriculture company needed assistance driving reach and video completions for a video series on their YouTube channel. Using in-stream, bumper and discovery ads on YouTube, the team was able to improve the brand’s overall organic presence.

Highlights

53MM
Impressions

55%
Completion Rate

$0.04
Cost Per Completed View

Challenge

An agriculture company produced a video series for its YouTube channel. But they saw few views and low channel engagement, despite having dozens of videos and a dedicated in-house YouTube team. They wanted to expand reach and video completions to see a greater ROI. However, this proved to be tricky. Most of the video content was longer than 5 minutes, which often loses the user’s attention, unless they are highly invested or are already brand loyalists.

Solution

Coegi worked alongside sister agency, True Media, to amplify content on YouTube to meet the client’s upper-funnel goals. View in-stream and bumper ads for their series introduction video helped increase awareness, with the goal of encouraging users to watch the full series.  Additionally, users who watched the full bumper ad or 30 second in-stream videos were retargeted with other relevant content in the series. 

We also recommended adding in Discovery ads that appear in YouTube search results and video suggestions. In this placement, users are redirected to watch the full video on the brand’s channel, thus meeting the goal of increased video views. 

Despite a quick turnaround time, the team achieved outstanding results from this campaign. With a roughly $100,000 investment, the campaign drove over 53MM impressions across the US and Canada. The average completion rate was 55%, exceeding the 40% benchmark. Cost per completed views were also efficient at just $0.04. Finally, this improved the brand’s overall organic presence. They also achieved over 100,000 earned views across videos that offered added value outside of the campaign investment. 

Using Digital Out-Of-Home and CTV to Drive Full-Funnel Performance

Posted on by Coegi

The Brief

Coegi partnered with a multi-national technology brand to simultaneously drive awareness, consideration, and purchase lift using digital out-of-home media, mobile retargeting, and connected TV.

Highlights

6%
Brand Awareness Lift

3%
Consideration Lift

9%
Purchase Intent Lift

Challenge

In our first year working with this technology brand, we identified an erosion of brand equity. This was due to a gradual shift in budget focusing solely on lower-funnel, promotion-based tactics. 

To reestablish their premium product positioning, we were tasked with eliminating crossover between their two key audiences (small business owners and IT decision makers) to drive awareness, consideration, and purchase intent with prospects across the United States. Challenge

Solution

We planned and executed a campaign to build brand affinity and awareness with small-business owners and IT decision makers and measure the effect on full funnel KPIs. By using data-driven campaign insights, we knew we could justify spending on brand awareness tactics. This would expand the organic prospect database and achieve sustainable growth through improved brand positioning. 

We honed in on two channels: Connected TV (CTV) and Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH). Throughout the campaign, we served over 55MM impressions. These spanned over 37 DMAs with high concentrations of small business owners and IT decision makers. To measure success, we implemented one of the first brand lift studies in the industry that incorporated CTV and programmatic DOOH channels by using IP and wifi targeting to obtain survey feedback.

DOOH media drove lift across all KPIs (awareness, consideration and purchase intent), with the greatest lift in purchase intent (+9%). This campaign messaging also drove a greater lift in awareness over the control group than previous campaigns, illustrating the long-term impact of this strategic messaging. Cross-screen exposure drove the strongest lift over the control at 13%. 

Additionally, the campaign drove:

  • 50% increase in purchase intent from CTV
  • 6.5% increase in SMB website visitors vs. previous period, seen in increases from direct and organic search traffic
  • 60,000 attributable site visits at an estimated $1.2MM in value

Finally, we discovered the awareness campaign had a trickle-down effect on the evergreen performance-based campaign we were running concurrently, surpassing bottom-line goals at a 5x ROAS.

The Value of Evergreen Paid Media Campaigns

Posted on by Coegi

Navigating the paid media landscape can be difficult for advertisers big and small. Making informed decisions on goals, targeting, and budget are challenging but integral aspects of reaching campaign goals. One of those challenging decisions is knowing when to keep campaigns running and when to pause. The first instinct when a campaign is underperforming is to pause or cancel. However, evergreen paid media, even at a lower spend, allows for increased campaign learning. This ultimately leads to long term benefits. Especially with automated campaigns, extended flights allow the platform to optimize towards the best performing audience and provide more insightful data.

Evergreen Paid Media Campaigns Keep Momentum Strong

When considering keeping campaigns on or deactivating, it’s helpful to think of the analogy of being stuck in traffic. The instinct when stuck in standstill traffic is to put the car in park and turn the ignition off. That would save fuel while things are moving slowly. But when traffic picks back up, you’re stuck having to turn your car back on. This takes more fuel and the cars around you are already down the road before you’re able to get your car moving again. In this analogy, think of your car as your campaigns and your fuel as your budget. By the time you get your campaigns going again, your competitors are already coasting down the highway. Plus, it took them less effort and budget to get down the road because new campaigns typically take longer to deliver results.

Campaigns with a longer duration historically perform better on platforms including Google, Facebook, and The Trade Desk for several reasons:

  • The platform optimizes towards campaigns with more history and higher engagement. Especially with Google Paid Search, Google’s algorithm is more likely to present an ad with a history of a high user engagement than something brand new.
  • The ability to A/B test audiences, creatives, and other strategies with a lower budget. Down periods of seasonality allows space for testing in a lower risk time period with smaller spend.
  • Spread awareness when intent may be lower. Though users may not be converting at the target rate, keeping campaigns on brings users into the funnel. Then, when they are ready to convert, you are top of mind.

Maintain Brand Consistency and Messaging

Users are more likely to trust a brand that they’re familiar with. This isn’t a new concept, yet it’s as true now as it has ever been. Consistently reaching a target audience keeps you in front of potential customers even if they’re not ready to make a decision. But, this doesn’t have to be at the expense of extra budget. Even keeping campaigns active at a much lower spend will keep users engaged and solidify your spot in their consideration set.

When seeking results in the paid media landscape, consistency and optimization is key. Staying in front of a target audience while making changes is more likely to lead to results than stopping campaigns. The best way to improve is to continue to test. Evergreen paid media campaigns are the most effective way to do that.

Key Takeaways

  • Learn and optimize before you cancel under-performing campaigns
  • Extend campaign flights for improved efficiency and platform optimization
  • Maintain consistent momentum to stay top of mind with consumers

For more tips on evergreen marketing strategy, watch this quick video.

How to Make Brand-Agency Relationships Last

Posted on by Coegi

Account Strategy Director, Danielle Wesolowski, discusses how to improve brand-agency relationships by putting client needs first through a strategy centered on togetherness and collaboration.

Brands, have you ever felt the frustration of receiving a media plan or creative from an agency that was completely different from what you had envisioned?

Agencies, have you ever hung up a client call feeling completely blind-sided about the direction and expectations for your campaign?

Misalignment between brand and agency teams can quickly build into frustration. How can we avoid the missteps that build tension between agency and brand teams and minimize the resulting efficiency losses? The work must start within teams. Then you can develop clear brand-agency collaboration to support strong marketing strategies and positive working relationships.

Coegi has an internal framework surrounding everything we do called the Coegi Way. There are four pillars: attitude, approach, service and culture. Looking through this lens, let’s explore how to build successful brand-agency relationships.

Attitude: The Sky’s the Limit

When initiating a new brand-agency partnership, or just a new campaign, start your process with an open mind. Take time to collaboratively brainstorm with each other – considering out of the box options. Sometimes we become so process-oriented we lose sight of the opportunities in front of us.

Add regular brainstorms into your process to audit competition, evaluate future opportunities, and find new ways to leverage existing capabilities. The goal is to “put yourself in a position with clarity of mind to execute at high levels of efficiency, innovation, and real creativity”.  Delight your client by reimagining possibilities for their brand.

Thought starters for impactful brainstorming: 

  • What are those things we would do if we could just remove the barriers?
  • What’s keeping us from incredible innovation, real creativity, and surpassing client expectations–or our own expectations?

Approach: Empower and Align Teams

Approach your collaborative marketing strategy like a chess board: assess the field of play and then implement your strategy. Both brands and agencies must enable their teams to do great work. To enable means giving people the power to take action, but also giving strength and confidence.

While strong teams value individual contributors, they must work together cohesively as a unit to win. Each person on your team should be providing the same experience to the client no matter who they talk to. If a different answer is given depending on who you ask – the team needs to be realigned. The same goes for in-house marketing teams and executives. If the CMO approves a campaign but the CEO enters the conversation and last minute vetoes key creatives or channels, this can cause major issues. Internal teams must be empowered to make decisions while understanding overall goals before they can effectively work with external partners.

Service: Understand the Client’s Needs

Agencies build lasting and trusting relationships with brands when they demonstrate a strong understanding of the client’s needs and provide tactical plans to act on those needs and deliver impactful solutions. The expectation we set for account team members at Coegi is, 

“An individual should be able to demonstrate a full understanding of their clients’ business needs and translate this knowledge into an actionable cadence of strategic and tactical plans leveraging the strengths of integrated digital communication channels to deliver consistent, differentiated and valued customer experiences.” 

This is crucial because 30% of marketing professionals surveyed believe not understanding their brand completely is the top barrier to successful brand-agency relationships, according to eMarketer.

We often take client requests and run with them. This is especially true in performance media, where campaign activation is agile and ever-evolving. When possible, facilitate more discussions before the tactical phase. Really understand client goals first and define the best way to reach those together. For example, when a client gives you a specific target audience, talk through the justification for that audience. Also, explore other potential options, and ensure their plan is optimized to reach their goals and aligned with your capabilities.

Culture: Meet Clients Where They are Comfortable

Translate your culture as an agency or team to your client. Find ways to connect with brand teams to allow both cultures to play off each other. Open the right communication channels to make your client comfortable whether it be group Zooms, 1:1 calls, or short emails.

Keith Schwartz, CEO of Bounteous, quotes, “It’s really about forming a partnership where you can leverage the best of both organizations. Mature business leaders understand that having a partner with knowledge capital about their industry creates a lot of value.”

A MediaCause article issues a warning, “ if you don’t establish a partner relationship from the start, you’ll more than likely forever be treated as a vendor.”

Never underestimate the importance of relationship building to gain trust with your client. Go beyond that vendor relationship to become a true partner. Give them space to talk candidly about problems, ideas, and goals. Provide honest feedback to each other. You can gain so much more from the client if you create these open communication opportunities.

To sum everything up, my advice is simply this: slow down and focus on collaboration.

3 Questions to Start Improving Your Brand-Agency Relationships:

  1. Where do you find the biggest challenges in understanding client needs?
  2. What are the biggest barriers to developing strong and trustworthy client relationships?
  3. What would you like to do differently to enhance those relationships?

If you’re interested in exploring a partnership with Coegi, contact us today to schedule a discovery call.

Brand vs Performance Marketing

Posted on by Coegi

As marketers, we often preach about setting separate KPIs for campaigns in different funnel stages. We are comparing brand vs performance marketing depending on campaign goals. While this is needed, we must understand the synergies between the two to fully optimize campaigns.

At Coegi, we define ourselves as performance marketing practitioners. Does this mean we ignore branding and top funnel efforts? Of course not. We believe that all marketing efforts can ladder up to business goals.

What’s the Difference Between Brand vs Performance Marketing?

A Forbes article explains, “Brand marketing encourages customers to raise their hands. Performance marketing makes it as easy as possible for a customer to get your product into their hand after they raise it.” Branded campaigns are structured to build brand affinity, recall, values, and other emotion-based results.

Performance marketing, conversely, is all about the numbers. Finding ways to build efficiencies and grow total results. These measurement-focused campaigns are built to drive conversions, leads, purchases, and purposeful clicks. All while lowering the cost per action based on channel, audience, and creative learnings.

How To Hold Brand Campaigns Accountable

Marketers that have historically leaned on traditional channels are shifting to digital platforms to have a more targeted approach. However, brand campaign dollars are generally not held accountable like performance dollars. Yet, there is an increasing demand from CFOs and CEOs for those quantifiable results and clear ROI.

A marketer’s job is to showcase the value of upper funnel marketing on long and short term business results. For example, a McKinsey study reported, “With a clearer understanding of consumer preferences and behavior at the early stages of their buying journey, companies report marketing efficiency gains of up to 30% and incremental top-line growth of up to 10% without increasing the marketing budget.”

Measuring Branding Campaign Results

How can you start to measure brand campaigns? Identify business objectives towards awareness that indicate a positive sentiment towards or engagement with your product. Ask the right questions, determine the right methodology, and understand what actions are truly driving interest in your brand.

Taking Full-Funnel Full-Circle

A MarketingProfs article explained this by saying, “brand-driven insight is your truth—the WHY behind all that you do. The performance marketing is your plan put into action—the HOW and WHAT of manifesting that truth.” By understanding this full customer journey, brands can make audiences feel understood. This is accomplished through using data-driven insights to build meaningful messaging on the channels where they are most present and receptive. Ultimately, this builds trust while optimizing budgets simply by being relevant to your core audience. This sets the stage for lower funnel campaigns and creates a more seamless path to conversion.

Coegi built a full-funnel marketing campaign to increase emotional brand connection and drive product trials for  a CPG client. We executed a performance branding study on Facebook to evaluate brand lift and conversion lift for key website events. This blended approach allowed for valuable insights into multiple stages of the consumer journey, from awareness to purchase intent. The results surpassed various CPG benchmarks and highlighted the importance of creating synergies between creative execution and operational strategy. It also placed more accountability on the incrementality of our branding efforts.

Key Takeaways

  • Treat all marketing campaigns as performance-based
  • Hold brand campaigns accountable with custom measurement frameworks that then inform business outcomes
  • Pull insights from bottom funnel campaigns to inform top funnel campaigns (and vice versa)

For more, read Boost Customer Lifetime Value with Awareness Marketing.

3 Key Steps To Maximizing Your Marketing Campaign’s Success

Posted on by Elise Stieferman

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.

 

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