Marketing can be elusive, a little difficult to understand and perhaps even frustrating. The inherent value of marketing and advertising is well understood, but it can be a struggle to measure its exact ROI (or to understand whether it’s working optimally).
This disparity can make budget planning difficult, and lead to some pretty awkward board meetings. How do you justify spend on one channel over the other? How do you get the most bang for your buck? What needs to be considered, and how can you guarantee a return on investment?
When it comes to marketing, there are no hard and fast rules. The market is never stagnant – forever changing and responding to current events, technological advancements and the net effects of advertising itself.
But despite this immutable fact, marketing shouldn’t be a matter of rolling the dice again and again. Through experience and sound metrics, you can estimate how well a campaign will do and learn which channels are the most lucrative for your business. These insights can inform your marketing spend greatly.
TV and radio advertising are hard to measure, but the wonderful thing about digital advertising is that you can trace your consumer’s every move. Here’s what the experts have to say about budgeting in digital advertising:
The right things in the right order
MECLABS CEO Flint McGlaughlin firmly believes in the importance of doing things in the right order. He says that optimising your marketing channels and related messaging should come only after optimising your product and its presentation.
Executing a plan in the proper order can save huge amounts of money and time, since we can take learnings from each stage into the following stages. McGlaughlin’s proposed order makes sense because an optimised product is easier to advertise, and the specifics of an advertising message can be channel-specific.
When crafting an ad, consider which learnings you’ll get from each part of the process and how those learnings will inform the other stages.
Knowing WHY you’re spending
It’s entirely possible to get so granular with your metrics that you can predict where the return of every dollar spent will be coming from and when.
As such, there is no excuse for not being able to justify and predict spend. Predictions can turn out to be inaccurate and the unexpected can occur, but that’s no reason to spend irrationally or without regard for the consequence.
Your initial spend on a brand new campaign should be a test amount, and you should factor in the possibility of seeing absolutely no return on that spend. The purpose of this initial blast is to get some initial findings, so test things. Test content, timing, subject lines, graphics, people, faces, colours and more. Get scientific.
Then, once you see which channels do the best and which kinds of messages work, double down on those while continuing to run experiments on the underperformers. Marketing is inherently creative, but its execution can and should be absolutely logical.
Asking yourself the right questions
And finally, always ask yourself the tough questions.
As logical as we can be, human beings are inescapably, well, human. We’re going to be prouder of some ads than others. We’re going to inherently “like” some channels more than others. Sometimes, even without realising, we might be irrationally biased towards forcing a failing campaign to work simply because we’d really really like it to work.
Sometimes, we need to take a step back and reflect. Which channels are making you the most money? Which messages are falling flat? Is your product different to the consumer than it is to you? Are people using the product for unexpected purposes, and should you ditch those hilarious ads you love in favour of what the data shows will be more effective?
The answers are up to you.
